We've had a fair few snow showers (and howling wind) down here in Co'path, but not enough for the kids to use their sledges (which they got for Christmas 2006 and haven't used yet).

So we headed up into the hills instead, searching for a slope that's close enough to the road, steep enough (but not too steep) and with enough snow to not get stuck in the grass.

Found it (eventually)

In common with a bunch of other blokes at the current project, I'm growing a moustache for the month of MOvember, in aid of Prostate Cancer. So do the right thing, and make clicky on the big blue button:

All sponsorships are made directly to The Prostate Cancer Charity which will use the money to fund high quality research into the causes, treatment and impact of prostate cancer and to provide support and information to men and their families.

As you'll notice if you're watching my latest iTunes music buys, I've just bought The Imagined Village — a set of resettings of traditional English tunes, with the likes of Billy Bragg, Paul Weller and Ben Zephaniah helping out folk stalwarts such as Eliza Carthy.

The results are pretty wonderful, not just because of the music (which has been rather unkindly described as Sitar lines and funky beats grafted on, and frankly is where Scots music was ten years ago with Martin Swan's Mouth Music), but firstly because this project takes up the grand old broadsheet ballad tradition of updating or replacing the words to songs to fit whatever the current situation, and secondly because it's exposing contemporary young(ish — le Bragg is about to be 50) musicians to traditional performing practises.

Anyway, it's very much worth a listen; and if you like your free samples before laying down the cash, here are some video tasters:

The Imagined Village Trailer

A look at the artists and music of The Imagined Village.

Hard Times of Old England Retold

The Imagined Village band perform this track live in The Big Room at Real World prior to their first performance at the WOMAD festival.

Wait a Minute, There's More

They've released Cold, Hailey, Rainy Night as a samplepack, downloadable from RealWorldRemixed, so with Garageband or similar, you can produce your own mixes, which is just what I've done:

We're on the move next month - having finally sold the current house, we'll be renting a rather nice 4 bedroom house in Cockburnspath, (pronounced Co'path incidentally) which is a few miles along the coast from Dunbar.

While we're there, we'll be looking for a plot to build a house, of which presumably much more later.

Move-in date is set for 21st29th September and we'll be in a caravan for 2 weeks between houses, so I guess we'll be having a joint housewarming/birthday party.

If, like me, you've gone out and bought an AMD64-based machine to run Ubuntu (or any other 64-bit distro) on, you'll have discovered that there's no Flash player available. Which is an awful pain when the point of the machine is to be a safe one for the kids to use on the Interwebs, specifically the CBeebies site.

Fortunately, Adobe's John Dowdell pointed out a rather useful wrapper that lets 64-bit Firefox use 32-bit plugins.

Two minutes on Google later, and I'd found a one-click install script for Ubuntu that sorts out nspluginwrapper and installs the Flash9 plugin.

NB it needs to be run for each user, but other than that, is bluddy grate.

JD, my kids thank you.

We're booked with Canvas Holidays, to spend two weeks in Sunny South Brittany.

The interesting thing is that I think this is the same campsite that I went to with Mum and Dad when I was about 13. Although much has changed since then — huge swimming pools with waterslides are now de rigeur.

Now I have to hit the Michel Thomas on the iPod, to refresh my rusty French.

Woohoo! Ruaridh, in Big Boy Pants, woke up in a dry bed this morning! I am so proud!

I waked up in a dry bed mommy come see
I waked in a dry bed daddy I did
I woke up in a dry bed w/ dry feet & a dry head
I am a big boy now