Clause 43 of the Digital Economy Bill was NOT passed into law as planned by the shower of expenses-fiddling self-serving egotistical idiots that we call a government.

This is A Good Thing.

If you don't know what this is about then worry not and if you do know then thanks for your support in preventing a damaging and iniquitous law from being added to the statutes.

On a regular basis we get some very odd phone calls.

Last week it was a man looking for information about train times at the Bo'ness steam railway.

In the past it's been people looking for berths at Inverkip Marina and even one woman asking for the price of entry to Linlithgow Palace.

Topping the lot was a recent email from someone telling us that she's coming to Ardrossan and asking what our weekend opening hours are.

What happens is this - someone looks up, say, Inverkip Marina on Google, finds our site and then calls the number on OUR contact page thinking for some totally incomprehensible reason that WE are Inverkip Marina.

The woman who emailed us presumably thought that we are Asda in Ardrossan! Trust us madam, we're not, not any price.

As you may gather this gets very annoying and ceased to be funny after the first dozen or so calls.

We take photographs of places and buildings and we'd like to make it clear that we don't run a railway, a castle or a hotel nor are we able to give directions from wherever you live to whatever town or village you might have seen photos of on our website or any one of the other ludicrous requests that people make of us.

So, if you've phoned us or emailed us and been given a short sharp reply then please forgive us and ask your doctor to increase your medication. Thanks.

You might have noticed that we have no links on this site to other websites.

There's a very good reason for that.

We spend time and effort getting people to visit this site (over 165,000 people last year) and having got them here we can see no point in showing them a list of other places that they can go instead.

After all, if you go into Marks & Spencer's they haven't got signs up pointing you to British Home Stores. That would just be silly.

The site has recently been changed round a little bit to make photos easier to find.

Instead of listing photos by subject type they're now listed alphabetically. The only exceptions are photos of the Waverley paddle steamer which are indexed under "W".

And yes "St" coming before "S" is illogical. On the other hand St is short for saint and that automatically comes before every other "S" on the site.

Hopefully having come across a subject you like you can now find more photos from the same area more easily.

All of the full-sized panoramas have been removed - the web space use was getting out of hand. We'll replace them with smaller versions on the matching pages as time allows and add "(P)" to the indexes to tell you where they can be found.

For various reasons some older photos are no longer being shown and some of the text pages have also been removed.

Recently, thanks to the scandal about Members of Parliament's expenses, a case of copyright theft involving an MP came to light. What a surpise that is, eh?

It seems that this MP used a photograph from a local photographer on his website and in his leaflets without bothering to ask first and quite probably knowing that the uses were infringements.

He was requested to pay damages at twice the normal rate (as a perfectly legal punishment for flagrancy).

And yes, you've guessed it. He then claimed back the money for his own personal theft in his expenses.

So you, as a taxpayer, have been charged to pay for the cost of his dishonesty.

One of the people being sued for copyright theft of an image copied from this website has quoted his local MP as supporting him in his defence of his commercial (and potentially criminal) theft of the unlicensed work.

Can you guess what comes next? It's not hard, is it?

That same MP has been found to have been fiddling his expenses.

What a really good character witness he's going to make! That said, he's now out of a job and may well remain in that state for a very long time if the runes are accurate.

As many of you will be aware (especially if you're reading this page after having been caught stealing an image or two) action is taken against the majority of copyright infringements of photographs and text copied from this website.

One thing that's hard to understand is the sheer arrogance (or is it ignorance?) of the thieves.

If kids steal albums as MP3s or download videos from websites (and it's well reported how common illegal downloading is) they then listen to them or watch them in private and no-one knows what the noise is in their headphones or what they're looking at in the privacy of their own homes.

And yet people think that they can steal an image and put it on the world wide web in full public view, often boasting that they now claim ownership of the stolen property and expect to get away with it! Which part of the phrase "world wide" are they too dumb to comprehend?

When did you ever see a shoplifter standing outside a store holding up the stolen goods and boasting where he got them from? Not to mention telling everyone his name and address, just to help things along.

As stated, it just sounds like plain ignorance. Either way, damages are due.

To add to that the recent changes to the law go some way to redressing the balance. Now, in theory, if someone uses a website to steal a lot of copyrighted material (and that of course includes photos) it's possible to simply ask a court to shut them down without them even being given a chance to argue the point first.

Do we have anyone in mind? Ah, well, that would be telling...