Yes, my local is a Drakes too, and one of the next closest is a larger Drakes that I occasionally go to for things I can’t get at the smaller one, but I’m pretty lucky - I travel by bike, so I do depend on what’s available fairly close. About every 3 months or so I’ll drop into Coles for one occasional item that I can’t get at Drakes, and I hate it - the self-service checkouts, the aisles filled with Coles-brand items … just the whole experience is shit.

There have been credible claims of a handful known to be out there with collectors, in particular Web of Fear 3 seems very likely, it would likely be a number in single digits if there are any. The problem here is that it says there are 97 missing (true), but then could be taken to mean all of these are missing because collectors have them. Rather they are all assumed to have been destroyed, but it is possible a small number escaped that fate and are still out there in the hands of collectors

I recommend the episodes of the Behind The Bastards podcast where they read through Ben Shapiro’s novel, they are hilarious.

City of Death for me. Rounding out the top 5 would be Talons Of Weng Chiang, Robots Of Death, Seeds Of Doom, Ark In Space.

The Bridge by Enza Gandolfo

Tales from the Security Kitchen - who doesn’t want to learn more about the Security Kitchen? For example, why is there a security kitchen?

No Complications - explores the back story of that one Ogron who speaks English much better than the others.

The Adventures of Belal - The doctor’s little sidekick from Death to the Daleks in a series of adventures involving various menacingly tiled floors.

I’m a bit of a late comer to Big Finish and make no attempt at keeping up with everything but I pick up bits and pieces, often when on special. On of my favourites recently has been The War Master series, I’ve found that to be consistently really good.

I guess it’s efficient in heating up a certain amount of water but the problem is that it was heating up far more water than I was ever using. The insulation of the tank keeps it warm to an extent, but the massive cut in gas usage suggests it was doing a lot of heating for nothing. The new one is efficient in the sense that it only heats what I need and has cut my gas usage.

I had to replace my hot water system a while back and was interested in changing gas to electric, but plumbers I talked to all tried to disuade me from it. In the end I changed from the existing large storage tank system which was here when I moved in and which was massively innefficient for the usage required. I didn’t want another system that was heating up a big tank of water all the time for no reason, and also was under time pressure with no working hot water, so switched to an instantaneous gas system which has cut gas use by a huge amount (perhaps 25% of what it was), so this at least a more efficient system for now but it’s put off getting rid of gas for a good few years. The only other gas appliance I have is a heater which is rarely used, cooking is electric.

I wrote about my earliest memories of Dr Who in a blog post a couple of years ago https://www.frogworth.com/stuart/blog/?p=2317 (then followed by posts on books, black & white episodes on VHS, and Big Finish)

Yes! Follow Cory Doctorow, he explains all of this so well.