According to the registration document I bought this campervan on 30 June 1999. It has accompanied me on holidays, house moves, festivals, travels and excursions. It has been used for many significant events, such as the departure vehicle on our wedding day and it even carried my canvasses to the Lambeth Conference.

Unfortunately for various reasons I need to sell it. I know I’ve said that before, but this time I mean it. It is likely I will be posting it on Ebay this weekend. I expect it to make in the region of 1000 to 2000 pounds, but it is very difficult to tell with these things. It will need to go for an MOT in the next few days, which of course it might fail. In summary: it is a VW Type 25 1988 1.6 turbo diesel (’turbo diesel’ is industry jargon for ‘a bit slow’, but it isn’t too bad). It goes and somebody could enjoy using it over the summer. Structurally it is sound, but cosmetically the bodywork is poor (worse than in this picture) owing to my incompetence. There are some other (hopefully) minor faults which I will explain when I do the advert. The interior is superb - better than most similarly aged vans on Ebay at the moment.

My other posts about this and other campervans are here.

Posted by Dave at 8:18 pm on June 30, 2009 and filed under Campervans, Photographs.

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I’m pleased to say that my 2010 ‘Guide to the Church’ calendar is now available. It contains 12 brand new cartoons that are not available anywhere else. It is subtitled ’situations vacant’ and is a guide to some of the jobs that you can do in church, for example bell ringer, choir member, cleaner, PCC member, coffee rota volunteer etc etc.

Producing 12 extra cartoons nearly caused my expiration, as it does every year. I really am only remotely funny once a week, meaning that such an extra effort resulted in blood, sweat and tears. Well, no blood, thinking about it. And not much sweat except when I kept the fan heater on too long. But some tears. Secretly though I am rather pleased with the cartoons - having not looked at them for a number of months I quite enjoyed them when my box of calendars arrived at the end of last week.

You can buy the calendar, which costs £5.99, via your local Christian bookshop (You might or might not have to order it), at Church House bookshop in Westminster (or online - they post overseas) or direct from the publisher, Canterbury Press (who also post overseas). Waterstones are listing it, but say 2-3 weeks delivery and then there’s Amazon, though it is currently out of stock.

The ISBN which will be useful for ordering via your local bookshop is 9781853119576

Update: The calendar is available on Amazon.com for those in the US.

Posted by Dave at 9:49 am on June 17, 2009 and filed under Books.

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I made the transfer from PC to Mac about a month ago. Here are my thoughts about it, numbered because the ordered list tag exists and I just don’t use it enough:

1. I changed computers because I had worn out the keyboard letters on my other one out through my furious and continual typing. Also because I had filled its hard drive up with diagrams. And because it wouldn’t play Youtube videos properly owing to a minor but incurable error. And for other reasons I have long since forgotten about.
2. The Mac is more shiny, has rounded edges and the keyboard is the best I have tried.
3. It takes a bit of time to get used to a new way of doing things, but most of it you can work out using experimentation. You don’t need to go to the Apple shop for special seminars really.
4. Most things on a Mac ‘just work’, but some things don’t, so you still need to do a bit of hunting around for drivers and those sort of things.
5. It still crashes, but rarely. To be fair, I found Windows XP also crashes very rarely if you have enough memory. Unfortunately Firefox makes XP crash continually because it uses excessive resources, but it is still my favourite browser.
6. It is so good not to need antivirus programmes. They are all troublesome. I’ve had to swear at the ones everyone else swears by.
7. I love that thing on the Mac whereby you can press the buttons on the side of the mouse and make all your different open programmes appear and disappear (I do it repeatedly just for the joy of it).
8. I suspect any new computer would have been a huge improvement on what I was using before, but I don’t think a new PC would be this good.
9. I like using the Mac mouse, but sometimes it stops working. Getting anxious about this and then discovering various remedies is a bad 10 minute experience every new Mac use must go through. They should explain about this ‘10 minutes of doom’ in the shop.
10. I still haven’t got the hang of organising my files and finding things quickly (edit: without typing). The PC system for doing this seems easier to use, but it could just be me.
11. People on Twitter are very helpful at offering instant advice for which I have been continually grateful.
12. I still need to decide which programme to use for doing my diagrams. I’ve been spoilt on the PC by the superb but deeply unfashionable Microsoft Image Composer which offers 1) the ability to instantly change canvas sizes by dragging the sides in or out and (2) the ability to drag sprites/layers in and out of the work area. if I find something that can do those things I will be overjoyed.
13. Unfortunately at the time of writing I still need Microsoft Internet Explorer for my work. Do not ask me why. It is a frustrating set of circumstances which cannot be circumvented by using Safari, Firefox, Opera etc etc etc. This means I still have my PC working in my office and the Mac working in the second bedroom and I wander between the two writing web addresses down on little bits of paper in a deeply ineffective manner. I may have to put IE on the Mac but it is oh so complex to do so.
14. Overall I am very happy with the Mac and glad I made the change. It is a lot of money to buy one, but when using a computer all day for your job it is worth having good kit. Unfortunately I still need to use both computers at the moment, making my computing the least efficient it has ever been. This is a lamentable set of circumstances that exist because of my peculiar needs.

Posted by Dave at 5:08 pm on June 7, 2009 and filed under Technical, In-depth analysis.

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Cartoon from We Blog Cartoons. It isn’t new, but I’m hoping no-one will notice.

My administrative systems are in a state of meltdown. I have never really got on top of the organisational side of running a business as many of you will be able to testify, but now it has got to the point of something needing to be done. I’d tell you more, but it is all rather embarrassing.

I think I need to get someone in.

What do you do? Do you have some sort of system that works, or do you pay someone else to organise things?

Posted by Dave at 3:06 pm on June 4, 2009 and filed under Starting a Business, Household hints.

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In order to help understand the elections tomorrow I am explaining them to myself in church terms (Warning: could be badly wrong and misleading).

So, we have:

• Local Council = Deanery Synod
• County Council = Diocesan Synod
• Parliament = General Synod
• European Parliament = The Anglican Communion

If there is a low turnout at the elections it will be because what is happening is not explained properly anywhere. The polling card that I have just discovered under the rubble of paperwork in the kitchen says that the ‘counting area’ is for ‘Basildon District Council’, but the leaflets that have come through the door all say ‘Essex County Council’. Perhaps they are one and the same, making my fourfold explanation above meaningless.

The European Elections are not mentioned at all, except in the small print. The European ballot paper is yellow - pass on this information to friends and relatives.

I am hoping that someone will explain it all to me, otherwise I will have a sleepless night.

Posted by Dave at 6:34 pm on June 3, 2009 and filed under Politics.

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This week has been the week of the Christian Resources Exhibition in Esher, Surrey, where the UK’s Christian organisations get together to buy and sell, like in the temple. Today is the last and greatest day of the feast, so I am heading off to do some further in-depth reporting.

I am secretly quite pleased with a series of photos I took on Wednesday: The Christian Resources Exhibition in photographs. (The page has a bitly address too in case you are a Tweetist: http://bit.ly/15iKx4 )

See you there perhaps if you’re there. Otherwise I intend to post some updates during the day on the Church Times blog, or failing that, Twitter (@davewalker).

A quick “shout out” (as they say amongst young people) to the unexpected clergy I saw on Wednesday: David Stone, Woody, Dave Warnock, Mark Hendley, and others.

Posted by Dave at 7:12 am on May 15, 2009 and filed under Festivals and Exhibitions.

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Hello. As you can see I forgot to blog here during April.

Here is why (warning: pretty dull). I have been:

• Blogging from the G20
• Blogging from Spring Harvest (You can find both of these via Church Times blog: April)
• Finishing my 2010 calendar . This nearly killed me, as it always does.
• Posting on Twitter, even though I said I never would (See Things that I am not going to get involved with on the internet, blog post from 2006). It is easy and ideal for the lazy and self-promotionalists, although less fulfilling than blogging.
• Taking a couple of days break
• Sitting in my office for days on end (I’m not exaggerating) trying to think up ideas
• Undertaking other work projects that I will class as ‘miscellaneous’
• Writing little things down in little notebooks
• Laundry
• Tending to animals

The two cartoons represent the best of my month’s work. Anything else I’ve done will be worse than these. (Although I am secretly quite pleased with these two, and my Church Times cartoon today was OK too.)

My new month’s resolution for May is to be slightly more interesting and post more nonsense on this blog. Also I have a new world-changing project to launch, perhaps.

Posted by Dave at 2:22 pm on May 1, 2009 and filed under Sundry posts, Cartoons.

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Just to say (for those who aren’t fed up of me going on about it) that I’ll be blogging from the G20 meeting in London’s Docklands over the next few days. Details here.

Barring technical malfunction (not out of the question by any means) I’ll be blogging in these two places:

1. The Church Times blog
2. On my Twitter page

As I’ve said on my Church Times blog post if you have any questions for world leaders I’d be glad to have them. I may well not get the opportunity to ask them, but you just never know.

Posted by Dave at 9:23 pm on March 31, 2009 and filed under Blogging, Current events.

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Some people told me that one of my diagrams was on the front page of the digg website over the weekend. Here is a link to the page about it: Link to the page about it.

The comments are not very kind as you can see. I was wondering where the unkind people gather - perhaps it is on the digg website.

Posted by Dave at 9:29 pm on March 29, 2009 and filed under Mundane.

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[Click on the image for the full sized version]

I’m a bit overwhelmed by things at the moment, and realise that I am rather behind on e-mail replies, telephone calls, invoices, things I’ve promised people and whatnot. I’ll try to do some catching up in the next day or so. In the meantime, apologies.

Posted by Dave at 10:41 am on March 24, 2009 and filed under Cartoons.

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I’ve really enjoyed all of your competition answers - thank you.

Kennedy Fraser got the answer right, although most of you were winners too with your entertaining answers. Here’s the widget in its final resting place:

The widget was the piece I was missing to make the gears work on one of my bicycles, hence the joy. Unfortunately the gears still do not work properly as I am not very good Sturmey Archer adjuster.

The bicycle is my circa 1976 Raleigh Twenty Stowaway folding bicycle. I bought it from eBay for about £43.

It is one of two and a half folding bikes I own (the half is a scrap raleigh twenty which I’m using for parts). It does not fold very well, but I plan to use it when I go places and want to lock a folding bicycle outside. I quite like the challenge of bringing the old fashioned granny shopper bike back into vogue. Other people have done so in far more convincing ways - see Sheldon Brown’s Raleigh Twenty page, and in the UK Littlepixel’s one.

I have a more sophisticated folding bike about which I might write more another time. I am a great believer in folding bicycles - see for example this post and some of the ones in my cycling category. I will perhaps write more about how I believe folding bicycles can save the world at some other point if anyone shows the mildest bit of interest.

Posted by Dave at 9:24 am on March 20, 2009 and filed under Quizzes and competitions, Cycling, Photographs.

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I have used my electric computer scanner and pasted together a copy of my Baptist Times interview in an adequate but not particularly professional way. This readable version is here (large jpeg image file, 800 or so kb, click again on downloaded image to enlarge, click back button to get back here).

Those who just want the general gist without the words can look at this picture:

As you can see I look like a model for a clothing catalogue. Actually that is my day job, but I have kept it quiet for fear of reprisals.

Thanks to Graham for sending the newspaper so promptly.

Posted by Dave at 11:00 pm on March 18, 2009 and filed under Cartooning, Interviews.

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