Aeroplane classroom

How I envy the children at this school. When I was at school, our classrooms were the usual, boring type!

For an aviation enthusiast, going to school in a British Shorts 360 airliner must be sheer heaven!

Birthday at Byland

Byland Abbey in North Yorkshire

It was my birthday on Thursday (16th April) and so we decided to have a day out somewhere. I had always liked the look of Byland Abbey and so, once we found out that we could catch a bus there, decided to have a visit.

We caught the bus to Helmsley, a wonderful market town which has better shops than Scarborough (as the North Yorkshire market towns always do!) and had dinner in a small cafe which specialised in hot chocolate (the chocolate here is very good!) but today we had smoked salmon panini, with a salad and cracked black pepper crisps accompaniment.

We then caught the bus to Byland Abbey, a 20 minute ride from Helmsley through very nice countryside and got out first sight of the Howardian Hills. It was the first time we had been that way through Ampleforth and Wass and onto Byland Abbey.

Byland Abbey is a very distinctive monument, and once had a huge rose window at the front. In my opinion it is the most beautiful monument in North Yorkshire, if not in England. It belongs to English Heritage.

It was a cold, windy day, and this did spoil the visit somewhat, but I still managed to take 56 photos at Byland! Opposite the Abbey is the Abbey Inn, which has a lovely-sounding menu but we did not eat here. I would like to head out that way again and eat at the Abbey Inn.

There's slow - and then there's Firefox

I have three browsers installed on my computer - Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox. My preferred browser is Opera, but today I decided to load up Firefox.

What a stupid idea - Firefox takes an age to start, runs slowly and pops up irritating messages about needing a "Quicktime plug in" (even following advice on this issue has not made the slightest bit of difference to this most stubborn and appallingly slow of browsers).

Firefox is always raved about but I have no idea why. I have put up with the little quirks of several of its incarnations but the latest version is the slowest program on my computer. I don't mind other Mozilla programs, such as Thunderbird e-mail, but Firefox is the biggest load of crap to ever be installed on a computer.