Apologies once again for the slow-down of new material appearing on this website, but this flu-type bug is proving to be a hard one to shift and a couple of us are still on the sick list with it, sniffling, snuffling, coughing and wheezing.

This is my twelfth day out of the office with it and that equates to more than the total time I've had off sick in probably the last six years, which gives you some idea - talk about the twelve days of Snifflemas!

It's probably partially my own fault, by refusing to bow to the inevitable and call in the quack - usually I believe in sweating it out, trying to ignore it and just working through, but I finally had to admit defeat and rely on a course of antibiotics, which are finally starting to kick in, hence my brief appearance here this morning (although from my home desk, rather than the main office).

Now, apart from explaining why things have been a bit quiet here recently, my main reason for sharing my situation with you isn't for sympathy, but rather to share the information I got when I finally turned to the professionals.

Apparently, there's "a lot of this about" at the moment and, according to the lovely lady locum who called at the weekend, it can be a particularly nasty little beast of a bug, so if you have and near and dear ones who fall into the "vulnerable" category - eg young, old, prone to chest problems - DON'T do what I did and wait to see what develops.

Most of us may hate putting on a medical service that can be severely stretched, particularly at this time of the year, but rather that than dither and end up with consequences that don't bear thinking about.

This thing starts with what appears to be the onset of a cold, develops rapidly into a cough, with temperatures going up and down rapidly and really knocks the stuffing out of the body's resistance ... I can't remember feeling this tired and drained for many a long year.

If you're in your twenties or thirties and fit as a flea, maybe you can fight it off naturally, but otherwise, this really is one for the antibiotics - and the sooner, the better.

Call the doc - or visit the surgery, if you're up to it (although my take on that is that I would just have been passing it on, as my daughter did to me, bless her), get the medication, stay warm, rest and drink plenty of fluids and eat at least something, whether you have an appetite or not.

Sounds pretty basic, doesn't it? Perhaps I should have followed my own advice a few days earlier ...

Back on form soon, I hope.

I suppose it had to happen - just when everything was going so well, we've had a nasty flu bug run through the office. At the latest count, three of us, myself included, have been confined to bed and I suspect there will be others after the weekend.

As a result, the new material flow to this site has slowed right down for the past few days, but with two of us past the worst, I'm hoping things will get back to normal soon.

Ah well, back to the hot lemons and brandy ...

... beggars would ride - but it doesn't hurt, once in a while, to consider what we'd like to see happening in this odd and oftimes frustrating world of ours, so, whilst Grumpy Grampy is having a break for a couple of weeks, to recharge his batteries (don't ask!) I thought I'd have a bit of a grump of my own.

In a week when we're hearing increasingly terrible news of the discovery of the bodies of two young girls, coupled with the likelihood that there will be other bodies found elsewhere soon and when the numpty civil servants of the Home Office have lost a computer disc containing the personal details of near enough half the country, we're also told that British trawlermen are throwing back hundreds of thousands - nay, millions - of dead fish, because they're catching more than our EU quotas permit.

Well, we can't do much about people whose minds are warped and damaged to the extent that they will commit crimes beyond the imagination of most of us and the civil service has always has - and will continue to have - more than its fair share of numpties, but this nannying government should be putting its foot down on the fishing issue.

I wonder what some of those faceless European bureaucrats would think about throwing away tons and tons of perfectly edible fish if they had to spend a month or so in any one of hundreds of villages and townships in Zimbabwe (or many other third world countries, for that matter) where the price of food has increased thousands of tons over this year ... and still there isn't any available most of the time?

For heaven's sake, we all know about "quotas" and not trying to over-fish stocks, but these fish are already dead, so they're hardly going back into the North Sea to help with the breeding programme. Sort something out, you be-suited bunch of over-paid pillocks!

Meantime, on the grander, world-wide scale, the Japanese have now decided they can go out and hunt whales that have been protected since they were all but wiped out and the rest of the world sits back and just mutters away, whilst twiddling the collective legislative thumbs.

Back here at home, we have the latest Rocky production - Northern Rocky, which teeters on the brink of being KO'd, whilst apparently the cash guarantees offered by Golden Gordon and his seconds is probably going to be viewed as "illegal" state subsidy by the soppy sprouts of Brussels, who apparently would prefer to see the life savings of hundreds of thousands of small investors, pensioners and charities just disappear at one blow, probably sometime after Christmas, always assuming that Northern Rock lasts that long anyway ...

Back with Zimbabwe, and we've had news of the death of former Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, Ian Smith. I always found something slightly more than distasteful about Smith's "arrogance", but I think a lot of people would have been happier - at least more relieved - if it had been Robert Mugabe who had popped his clogs first. Until that happens, there's little or no hope of any sort of light at the end of the tunnel for his beleaguered people ...

Do I have any solutions to offer this troubled world? Well, perhaps, but I won't bore you with them here, because most of them would never work in practice anyway, but perhaps, as the traditional pantomime season approaches, we should all look around for our magic lamps and beans and make a collective wish that sometime soon, somewhere in the world, common sense and humanity gets the chance to play some part in the way we're riding along towards a future that promises to be full of little more than i-Pods and idiocy

Hardly much of a legacy to leave to our grandchildren, who may learn the hard way that a life filled with computer games and music channels may be fun in a lot of ways, but that what really counts is the food on the table at meal times, being able to walk outside the home safely at any time of day or night and being able to have a bank account that isn't suddenly emptied by either a criminal identity thief or a set of greedy, incompetent city bankers ...

It's a sure sign that the years really are advancing, when you look around and realise that what you thought happened just a few days ago actually happened nine or ten days back - it's the familiar "where has the time gone?" scenario and it's hit me again this morning, when I looked and saw when it was I last posted an update in this corner.

In fairness to my greying hairs and withering grey cells, I suppose it has been a VERY bust nine days in bewteen, spending hours glued to this machine and getting pages prepared and posting them up into the website - at the moment there are just two of us getting everything ready for you to see and there is still a lot of "groundwork" to be done in many of the sections, which means things are still taking longer than they will do eventually.

Mind you, it's all starting to come together well and, after an initial few days when we didn't get a lot of feedback from you, the e-mails have started to arrive in greater numbers, some with comments about this new website venture, others with nice comments concerning the demise of the old printed version of the magazine - we would like to thank all of you for taking the time and trouble to write in.

If you're one of the new regular visitors here,you'll have noticed that the website has grown immensely since we launched it on 5 November -there are now well over a hundred separate web pages in here (although some of those are admittedly still under construction) and we're adding at a rate of up to ten new pages per day, with some archive material (by request) and a lot of new stuff, especially in Molly's "Time Out" section.

Personally, I've been busy with my cricket section - there were several requests for me to put up my "Umpire Strikes Back" stuff from a couple of years back, where I was explaining various rules and cricketing terms (there are a lot of them, let's face it) and I've got a weekend ahead doing a lot more work in polishing up the Sports section as a whole, in between watching a lot of football and cricket on the box.

Right now, there's a long day ahead, accompanied by Radio 2's "Children In Need" programming, so it's time for another cup of tea and then back on my head ...

At first I had intended to update my little blog here in time for the official launch of our new-look website on Monday, but for a variety of reasons - not least the fact it was a madhouse here, trying to load content pages in time - I thought it best to wait a day or so and see what sort of feedback we started receiving.

First of all, the big question was: "Would we get any visitors?" Thankfully, the answer to that one has been a resounding "Yes", although I suspect the numbers will grow quickly from the early levels anyway, as more people get to find us.

We've even had our first e-mailed competition entries, which is a sure sign people are coming here on purpose and not just blundering in by accident, which can happen on the internet, as we all know.

Early feedback from readers - not a huge amount, if I'm honest, but then perhaps that's a sign that you like what we're trying to do here - is pretty positive, with a couple of suggestions already that we'll be incorporating shortly. As I keep saying, we want you all to play an active part, as this is still YOUR magazine, albeit in a different format from the old printed version.

So we're up and running and now come the hurdles - we're still working on software and programming to make more of our competitions able to be entered on-line and we're also putting together something that will enable local employers to advertise job vacancies, free of charge. Hopefully that one will be under way by the end of November (fingers crossed).

Meantime, we have a massive job ahead, converting content into web pages - several readers have asked if we can archive some of our older material, such as history articles, local articles, DIY tips and so on and that was always part of the intended equation, but it's very time consuming, so please be patient.

It's strange, but while much of what we're now doing isn't so very difficult from what we were doing for the printed magazine, there are subtle differences, as well as some obvious ones and it's been a case of learning some new skills and adapting old ones, but we ARE getting there!

It's a learning curve all the way and already we've redesigned some pages that we thought we had sorted a couple of weeks ago, as we strive towards some basic concepts.

Firstly, we're trying to make this website EASY TO NAVIGATE, rather than trying to show off our so-called technical expertise, because we want to entertain you with the content of this on-line magazine, rather than fill it with loads of flash-looking graphics.

Secondly, we're trying to ensure that the individual pages are easy to read and follow and not designed for people with 20-20 vision and/or magnifying glasses. Hopefully, we're achieving both these goals.

We're also making sure that the site isn't littered with those annoying pop-up adverts, although, as we get more sponsors on board, I would ask you to take a look at what they're offering, if ever the need for their goods and services arises. After all, it's their patronage that will keep this site FREE to you ...

Well, I've waffled enough for now, but I'll be back again in a few days. Between now and then, we've got about another forty or fifty pages to try to get up here, so wish us luck ...

Cheers for now,

Bob

As I sit here writing this, there's just under a week to go until we officially launch the new Post-on-Line website, but of course we've made it possible for you to come inside here and take a look at it, as we steadily construct the framework and begin to add content.

Already we can see that quite a lot of you are visiting the site and the Post Forum is beginning to come to life, though we expect a lot more activity once we get to launch day.

As you know, we have had a web site of sorts up here for a while now and made a couple of attempts to revamp it, but the main problem was that, with a very small team and a printed magazine to prepare on a regular basis, the site had to take an often poor second place.

Without the need to concentrate on the printed magazine now, we're confident that we can grow this site into something as worthwhile as the original magazine was and, perhaps, make it even better and more widely read.

Unfortunately, from several e-mails we've received since announcing the demise of the old printed Post, we're going to lose a percentage of our older readers, mainly because they don't have computers and internet access, but sadly there was and is little we could do about that.

If you know anyone who falls into that category, please convey our apologies to them and PLEASE try to make it clear that dropping the old magazine and going in for this e-version wasn't a decision based on our trying to make loads of money on the cheap, as one lady put it.

Actually, it's a decision that has been forced upon us by economic necessity - the bald truth is that the printed Post NEVER made a profit and was subsidised through the profits of our main company, InterCash and eventually, when it became obvious that the situation was never going to improve, there was nothing for it but to bite the bullet and let my "baby" go.

However, I was reluctant to let the name and the idea go completely, and so I decided we should at least try to make our presence felt here, on the web - whether or not that ever achieves any success, of course, is largely up to you, the readers. Our now even smaller team will do its utmost to give you what you want, but we'll be relying on you to let us know if we're succeeding in that.

You can also help by passing on the website address to anyone you know who might enjoy what we're trying to do here and, if you know any individuals or companies who you think would be interested in becoming sponsors/advertisers, point them in our direction, too (it's cheap at the moment, so any potential sponsors should move in quickly!)

Well, for the moment, it's back to editing content to add to the site, but I'll probably also add a few up-dates in here as we do that. Hope you enjoy what you've seen so far and I look forward to seeing you back soon.

All the best,

Bob