Woodinblack

Yes, thats understandable. But as she just said when I relayed that to her - "I would rather be a small business in the EU not selling to the UK than a small business in the UK not selling to the EU". That relied on the low value consignement relief (LVCR), which was £15. Basically anything below £15 wasn't liable for VAT to make life easy, so you could get suppliers to say it was lower than £15 and it wouldn't be checked unless you were lucky. They have got rid of the LVCR from 1st Jan too, there is no lower threshold now, everything is liable. edit - which means if you import something that costs £1 from anywhere (this isn't a europe thing), you would pay £1.00 for the item, 20p for the vat and presumably £8 for the royal mail tax. edit 2 - as my wife just said "If they wanted to do this, why didn't they just build a wall around the country?"

Listening to my wifes conversations to European customers and suppliers, they are all pretty much the same, an overwhelming sense of embarrassment that our country has done this.

Sadly not - her main competitor (who rips off all her stuff) is in the Netherlands but has a UK supplier too.

Hope thats not the old one I returned to them

Vat is the smallest of issues in my wifes business, that is just an additional cost. No, the problems are that she is a small one woman shop that sells around 500 products, some handmade, some bought from suppliers (pet supply stuff). When sending to the EU now, each of those products needs an ID for customs, which is ok if it comes from a large supplier but obviously not if it is handmade. When she sends something to europe she has to do a declaration with all of those product IDs. Which she doesn't have and cant get. obviously she can pay for these ids, but the products have a value all probably less than a tenner and the IDS is a lot of work and cost for each one. At least that is what we think. There is no government page on it that doesn't have a contradicting government page on it. In conversations with her suppliers, they don't really know. There are a few suppliers in Europe who are just not even going to bother sending to the UK as it is too complicated Then she needs an ID to have permission to even send the stuff. Then there is the cost of sending stuff which is going to go up massively, to the point where the cost of the shipping will be far in excess of the costs of the items. Basically, for a business like hers, this has removed Europe as a market, there is no way to be competitive with a business that is already there. For those that say 'oh this is just like dealing with the rest of the world; - no, it isn't even close. The closest thing is dealing with some of the non EU european states, which was always a lot of hassle (but quite low issues), where you have to know the individual rules and quirks of dealing with it, such as norway. USA / Australia etc - nothing like the hassle dealing with them. Basically I can't see that if you had introduced a law banning small companies from dealing with europe it would have done any more damage to the country.

Indeed - having spent the morning looking into what we do for my wifes webshop, import and export, for the moment we have accepted that we will just stop all selling to the EU until it is clearer and take the 20% loss to her business. She hasn't got the time to deal with the extra paperwork, its a lot easier if you have staff to deal with it. Sunlit f'ing uplands.

The one guy who runs bax single handedly probably hasn't got round to it yet

This is with the battery out certainly (with the battery in things can be different). With 'normal' active wiring, the socket acts as a swtich, so the ring goes to the battery negative and nowhere else (as you say). When the plug goes in, the socket shorts out the ring and the shield and negative terminal of the battery is shorted to ground, which powers the preamp. As the wiring here is very simple, it is worth checking. it should be purely one wire that connects battery - to the output socket ring and not connect to anywhere else. If it is wired like that, there is no battery in and there is no plug in the socket and you can read any connectivity with any instrument you have (and you are not touching the probes), your socket is broken.

No, not that big/heavy *for an all valve head*, but I wasn't making that distinction. For a *thing that I have to carry* it is big and heavy.

I am certainly not going to take my £1M violin with me to europe, thats for sure.

Oh that looks interesting, same as the 1005 but 3" shorter.

We covered it in the bit about the 5 string a few weeks ago

That is the prevailing logic yes, but when I had mine I flipped between flats and rounds. Probably was better with flats but I have never really been a fan. I guess probably old short scales like Hofners suit flats as they are fairly dead anyway.

They have yet to make a bass that doesn't.

And I will take them when Al moves them on again

Indeed - so not for a commited Jam fan as it was never used in the jam, so they would want one of the others. I think I saw him playing that live a few years back. Yep - I did.. ftj-bass.mov

Additional purchases of the year since the november edition. An honourable mention goes to my new ABM600 evo IV, which for less than £350 as a B-Stock from PMT is more than worth it (It has a break on the tolex on the side, pretty small, first gig sort of injury). Run it up loud once, still yet to gig it obviously due to a lack of gigs. The BAM200 at the top though still doing sterling service for home practice. While I am here, I forgot the pictures of the other things, which of course means they don't exist.. The Shuker: And the (replacement) EHB1505MS Actually, that isn't the replacement, that is the original, but it looks remarkably similar!

Stuff not really selling at the moment

Same here - couldn't gig that, I would be frightened of messing it up

My gigs haven't been that successful!

Just looked at it. Some are completely missing, some a really detailed, I never wrote a diary so I have no idea why I started but I am glad I did.

I made a note of mine over the last 5 or so years, and it is interesting to note. Just simple notes on it, not settings etc, just how it went, what out of the usual happens etc. Normally a couple of lines