Welcome to a rep from Clan McKerrell who has joined this week. If you haven't already contributed, we hope to hear from you soon. ****** ****** ****** Spent an enjoyable evening recently swapping stories with a fellow Os family historian on the trials and tribulations of 'on the ground' research in England - I am going to get across the border to visit Arran and adjacent parts eventually. Topics included the varying size & cost of B&B breakfasts, best time of day to travel, etc. One thing we were both in agreement on, is not to attempt to squeeze too much into a day, especially in terms of distance travelled. One of the hardest things to get over to new travellers to the UK in general is that for road travel once off the motorways, any comparison with travel times back home over similar distances should be at least doubled if not multiplied by 2.5; while for public transport the smaller the quantity of luggage the better, as the distance from the bus/train station to the eventual destination is almost always longer in fact than it appears on the map By far the best results also seem to come from a relaxed itinerary - not matter how keen one is to resolve all those brick-walls, trying to do too much usually leads to frustration, and more importantly can lead to the wrong choice when one gets behind. Anyway I hope we are not going to have to wait too long for Linda's tale of her Arran visit - hinted at not long ago. ****** ****** ****** Admin: With the impact of the "sven" virus still in effect with large quantities of spam circulating, to combat the problem many ISP's are at last offering both Anti Spam and Anti Virus products to their users. Unfortunately at least one subscriber's ISP: gem.co.za is using an AV scan product with a bug in it. This causes the email to loop around about five of that ISP's servers, and then repeat until the "too many hops" trigger is activated. The resultant bounced message headers are 70+ Kb in size. I am advised that the problem is being worked on, so if you have been having problems contacting 'hillbilly', this may be the reason. ****** ****** ****** Feel free to join in and present your own items. Peter Cook cookfmly@bigpond.com List maintainer and Co-host with Barbara < babrown12@optonline.net > of the ButeshireGenWeb mailing list.