I turned Radio 4 off today.

Every morning I woke up to the Today programme. It’s the news and current affairs flagship of the BBC. But a large dose of monomania has now permeated the corporation, particularly Radio 4.

This time last year I thought I’d time the interval between me waking up and the first hearing of the word Muslim or Islam. I’ve since done it every weekday for the past 52 weeks, and the longest gap has been eleven minutes. I realise it’s a news programme, and that that particular religion is currently newsworthy, but so is Amy Winehouse, and fotoLibra, and Judge John Deed, and rugby, and we don’t wake up to them every morning.

I’ll admit it; it has begun to prey on me. It’s getting on my nerves. I now grit my teeth when I hear the word. We didn’t even get a break over Christmas — the celebration of the birth of the Christ child, in case the BBC has forgotten, and the origin of another religion, known as Christianity.

Today, Sunday, I woke up to the Sunday equivalent of the Today programme, called, perhaps unsurprisingly, Sunday. It features religious and ethical news of the week. Today we had a major feature about two women going shopping for hairspray wearing burkas, or niqabs, or hijabs, or some black garment which enabled them to conceal themselves from head to foot.

I’m insulted and offended by this. It’s not only that the BBC hammers on about Muslims all the time, but I grew up in a culture where the bad guys wore masks. You only conceal your identity when you’ve got something to hide. It’s no secret that at least one male would-be mass murderer has tried to escape by disguising himself as another super-sensitive moving black object, ready to spring into offence if stopped and questioned.

Yet the BBC think that a feature on Muslim fashion and shopping is relevant and interesting to a religious news programme. Would they do the same for Jews? No. Buddhists? No. Hindus? No. Christians? Certainly not! They are obsessed with poor bloody Muslims. Why can’t they leave them alone? Or else change the name of the prog to Al-jumu`a and run it on Fridays?

Radio 4 ran a fascinating programme on Christianity and the Nicene Creed earlier in the week, presented by Melvyn Bragg, a genuine intellectual, theological and historical discussion which would have been worked well on the Sunday programme.

Instead we were fed a vacuous feature about shopping as a Muslim. Oh, please. What next?

Even that didn’t make me turn off Radio 4. That moment came at 1.30 this afternoon, after the news. There was a programme on fly fishing, not a subject that normally has me gripped, but good journalism can make any subject interesting.

What came next was this: some woman was going to introduce fly fishing to a group of Muslim women, who in turn would share their views and experiences of Islamic culture.

Click.

Thanks guys, I’ll be seeing you when you pick up on my idea of visiting all the small countries of Europe with a Jewish pal. Or not.

Christmas day dawned grey and mild. As I clean my teeth I can see the church in Llandanwg, exactly a mile away in the dunes on the beach. The church, dedicated to St. Tanwg, is very small and very old. It’s said to date from 435AD, which would make it the oldest church in Great Britain by a couple of centuries, and though local pride urges me to believe this, it seems unlikely that Christianity’s first footfall on these islands was on the deserted sandy shores of Dyffryn Ardudwy.

I know of one other church dedicated to St. Tanwg, and that’s a mile up the road the other way in Harlech. In Welsh the T mutates to a D after an N, as you know, so Llan (the church) of Tanwg becomes LlanDanwg. Welsh orthography should adopt the CamelCase.

We walked down the hill for the 10:30 service. It’s calm and mild, and mist is rising from the sea and rolling down from the Rhinogs. It is very beautiful. The tiny church is packed, standing room only, and the old stone flagged floor preserves the cold most efficiently. I lose the feeling in two toes in my right foot after about 20 minutes. Stephanie the Vicar (one day I will get used to it) announces 12 minutes into her sermon that she’s not going to give us a sermon today.

When we come out of church the sun has broken through the mist lying on Y Maes. It is truly magical. A lovely Christmas morning.

Back at the house I discover a different form of epiphany: the finest sherry I have ever encountered. Sherry’s OK in general; it’s not my drink of choice, but I can appreciate its subtleties and I’m never going to say no to a glass. But this raised any pleasure I have ever taken from sherry to undreamed of heights. It was (still is, there’s a drop or two left) fabulous, unparalleled, exquisite. The nose was rich, full, sweet and complex, an almost overwhelming melange of spices and flavours. I’m not going to say cinnamon and honey and woodsmoke because that’s not only pretentious but wrong. I can’t begin to describe it.

Then the big surprise was the taste — when you smell sweetness that’s generally what you’re going to get, but this was gloriously dry, vanishing in the mouth but with all the flavour remaining, like swallowing an organ fugue. Believe me, it was sensational. So if you ever find this particular sherry, get it. I cannot praise it highly enough.

Here are the details: it is a Gonzales Byass Finest Dry Oloroso, Anada 1964 Vintage Sherry. It came with a letter from El Capitan, Don Mauricio Gonzalez, Marques de Bonanza (that’s the title for me) to say it was bottled in 1995. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. I think it might cost you a bob or two, though.

Incidentally St. Peter’s-on-the-Wall, Bradwell-on-Sea, Essex, claims to be the oldest church building in England, dating from 654AD. Nice to know our local church was already 219 years old before those heathen Saesneg got the picture.

Driving up the motorway last night in the fog, we followed an Eddie Stobart lorry with the left hand rear door unpainted, so the right read simply
DIE
BART
Does Sideshow Bob work for Eddie Stobart? We should be told.

Members who have joined since we launched fotoLibra v4 on December 6th won’t be getting Jacqui’s Picture Calls just yet, because the routine is still being written. Do not feel left out — they are also posted to the Summary page under Info in your Control Centre. This morning we posted the biggest Picture Call ever — 500 of the most important buildings around the world — and you have till the end of January to get them in, you lucky people.

You know, Version 4 must be a rip-roaring success. I’ve been flogging away writing the answers to Support Search because all the version 3 answers simply don’t apply to Version 4. I’ve just finished them, and they’ll be on the site by Christmas. And my corrections will probably be made in January.

But I’m not sure why I’ve bothered, because I tried out the Support Search just now and as expected, nothing happened. Then it struck me — nobody has complained that it’s not working. That’s despite a tripling of traffic to the site in the last two weeks. Clearly the site is so intuitive nobody needs our help to operate it.

How good is that?

Images need to be 300dpi (ppi) in order to be captioned, keyworded and published on fotoLibra. Even if they are larger than 300dpi,” that too will trigger an error message. Buyers want 300dpi images; if an image has higher or lower resolution it will slow down their production process, cost them money and they will go to another supplier.

OK, version 4.0 has taken off and we are getting rave reviews from around the globe. Everybody seems to like it, once they manage to log in and upload. We haven’t had a single negative comment.

But as with all new systems, people will run into difficulties. So our support team was bombarded with questions which, after a while, resolved into just four main queries. So I thought I’d answer them here, and direct members to this blog.

I can’t log in
It’s a cookie problem. The first thing to do is to clear your cache and your cookies (most important) and restart your browser. Failing that, try using another browser. We are now aware of various unrelated issues with Safari on Mac OS X, and till these are resolved we recommend using Opera or Firefox.

I can’t find my uploaded photos
Go to Control Centre> Portfolio> Manage Collections and click on the Process button beneath the blue Quota bar.
If you don’t choose the Collections to add your images to when you come to editing them, they will be placed by default in your first Collection alphabetically.

I can’t upload with your new FileChucker
Well, like us, you are using Safari on OS X. We are working on it. Meanwhile, please use another browser such as Opera or Firefox in order to use FileChucker on the Mac.

Some of my uploaded photos have been rejected
Possibly one or more of your files did not meet our Submission Guidelines.
Please download the new Submission Guidelines.
We’ve now enforced the acceptance criteria which we have always advertised, but were previously lax in imposing. As shown on the Upload page of the site, these are as follows:

• • Images can only be JPEGs Level 12 or TIFFs; no RAW
• • The image’s shortest dimension (width or height) must be greater than 624px
• • Image file size must be greater than 2048 KB (2 MB)
• • Images must be in RGB or Greyscale; no CMYK
• • Images must be 8-bit
• • Images must be 300 dpi (no more, no less)
• • A TIFF image can be uncompressed, or use LZW compression. No other forms of compression are allowed

The red Error message that you will see after a rejected upload will tell you why your upload failed. It will stay there as an awful reminder of your peccadillo until we figure out how to turn it off. It will not affect your upload quota.

There are a number of minor issues — the “email Collections” icon doesn’t work and when you try to sort your Collections by Size, you get told you have no collections. It’s a dirty lie. We’re working on all these, but I will confess I prioritised the usability of the Buyer side of the site, to the benefit of us all.

Please let me know what you think of the new fotoLibra v.4.0. I think I’m man enough to take it.

OK, I know this is my personal blog, but a) we haven’t got the business blog up and running yet and b) this is the biggest thing in my life right now.

fotoLibra v4 went live at 01:14 GMT this morning. We’re now dealing with baffled users and one or two expected but unanticipated glitches. But judging by the number of uploads we’ve had today, I think we can safely say it’s been a roaring success.

Tomorrow the Picture Buyers start to hear about the new site, in a nice chocolately kind of a way. We’ve sent chocolate to everyone who’s ever bought a picture from us. I like chocolate, but this was a humungous amount. I made many trips to the post office, and this far I haven’t snaffled a bar.

Some of our members have taken to uploading pictures with file names which contain punctuation such as apostrophes, dashes, brackets and even a tab! This renders the filename invisible to our system and Neil Smith apoplectic with rage. That’s zeugma, by the way. Don’t do it.