When we spotted this notice in Ottakar’s bookshop in Harrogate, back in 2004, we thought it was a good joke. But, like all the best jokes, it seems to contain a kernel of truth.

Friday’s session at Colpitts Poetry was the launch of Permanent Winter, a collection of poetry from Siberia published by Smokestack Books, and the readers were intended to be editors Yana Glembotskaya and Oleg Burkov, as well as publisher Andy Croft.

Yet despite traveling to Novosibirsk – and beyond, to Kemerovo, a four-hour journey on an unheated bus! – Andy Croft had to appear in Durham without his Siberian collaborators, since they had had problems obtaining visas, not from the Russian but from the British authorities.

Poetry is not only dangerous, it is also resourceful and well-connected: Michael Standen had used chess-playing contacts to reach a group of exchange students – from, by pure coincidence, Siberia – who kindly came and read poetry to us. So the evening was able to proceed, if not exactly as planned, with the traditional Colpitts candlelight readings, first from Andy Croft in English, then by a relay of guest readers, each representing one of the five poets collected in the book.

When I am preparing a page for the web, the last stage is to validate the HTML – use software to check that my coding is correct. This is a helpful way to spot small faults, tags opened but not closed, images with no alt text, and so on.

But – particularly if my starting point was a word-processed document, or has foreign words with accented letters – it also queries non-standard characters: not just the és and üs, the ampersands and double quotes (which have their own uses in coding, and can’t therefore be used in the text) but also non-standard punctuation, smart quotes and smart apostrophes.

Sometimes these are numerous, and it all seems like nit-picking: is it really worth the bother? And then I visit a web page (like this one, for a vineyard in France) which has skipped this detail, and where my browser stumbles over the unfamiliar characters, in this case rendering every o circumflex (ô) as ^TM – and realise again that yes, it is.

We went on Friday evening to Colpitts Poetry, where Valerie Laws was reading with Jenny Lewis.

The two poets are friends, and know each other’s work well, which made for a relaxed and sociable atmosphere, and also for some entertaining give and take between them. Jenny Lewis asked Valerie Laws to read one of her early poems, about the sex-lives of slugs, as a prelude to a piece of her own, a poem which she had written in her garden and left outside, so that when she returned to retrieve the sheet of paper, she discovered that it had been half-destroyed by slugs, and the poem slug-edited down to a haiku – an excavated haiku, rather than one of Valerie’s embedded haiku.

I don’t talk much about completing web sites: no web site is ever complete, they can always be improved, expanded, polished, updated. Nonetheless, there’s a sense of achievement when a web site is ready to be launched, to be opened to the public – and all the more so if that’s accompanied by some sort of celebration!

This has been a fruitful autumn for Cornwell Internet in that respect. First we completed the refurbishment of the Red Squirrel Press site, in time for the publication of their third book; then came the launch of Vine Visit Ltd, a specialist tour company offering holidays for wine lovers, visiting the vineyards and talking to the winemakers.

Although the people behind Vine Visit Ltd – Helen Savage and Jamie Harrison – have years of experience in running trips of this kind, the company itself is a new one, and there was a breathless dash to get the web site up and functional in time to start accepting bookings for holidays in 2008.

But when it was done, there was a party! Admittedly, the party was for the launch of the company, not just the web site, but a party at the Biscuit Factory, with interesting artwork to look at, and delicious wines from NH Wines and wine related music from a cappella singing group Scherzo – it was a fine evening.

And so home, and on with the next site!

Just before we went on holiday, we agreed to take over the web site of Red Squirrel Press: the timing was so tight that the night before we set off, I was busy re-making the front page to advertise the launch of their second publication, Kevin Cadwallender’s Colouring in Guernica!

We were very sorry not to be at that launch, which sounded great fun: Kevin is always an entertaining reader, and Sheila Wakefield, the driving force behind Red Squirrel, had created a special Red Squirrel award, just for Kevin, in recognition of all he has done to promote other poets in the north-east – and managed to present it, too, despite having fractured her elbow (ouch!) only a few days before.

So it was a particular pleasure to go last night to the launch of James Oates’ Wideyback, the third poetry collection from the squirrels’ drey. It took place in a smart bar in Newcastle, an interestingly shaped space, all alcoves, low lighting and plenty of sofas, which would have been perfect for the sort of party where you drift around and talk to different people – and I enjoyed the part of the evening where we did just that. It was a bit of a challenge to the reader, though, particularly since James Oates was losing his voice, and there was music seeping through from the main bar space next door.

The words more or less held their own, though, particularly performance pieces like the Bigg Market Tarantella, James Oates’ homage to Hilaire Belloc:

Do you remember the Blackie Boy, Amanda?
Do you remember the Blackie Boy?

or his consideration of the particular flavours of wet kisses on the metro, in which Valerie Laws joined him to read the lines attributed to Jilly Goolden.

Quieter pieces, like A Longing for Clear Blue Skies were harder to follow, and I was glad to be able to read them afterwards, on the page. But then, I’m lucky enough that reading poetry is part of my job: my task for this morning was to add two poems from Wideyback to the Red Squirrel web site – and two from Colouring in Guernica for good measure.

The small town of Houghton-le-Spring has been holding an annual autumn festival since the middle ages: Houghton Feast may have originated as a Michaelmas celebration, but it survives as an excuse for a fine mixture of community events, not to mention the ox roasting and all the fun of the fair (and of course, it always rains for some of the time at least!)

Sheila Quigley’s crime novels centre on the fictitious Seahills Estate in Houghton; so naturally Houghton Feast plays a large part in her books. She returns the favour by leading a walk, with the help of local historian Paul Lanagan, around some of the sites mentioned in her work. Cornwell Internet joined a group of enthusiastic fans on Saturday afternoon’s tour,

Someone had gone to great trouble to prepare the route beforehand. For example, the windows of the Library (the point of departure) were adorned with “Wanted” posters. And when Sheila paused at the footbridge, to read the opening of Bad Moon Rising in which a young woman’s body is found under that very bridge, she found herself standing next to a sad little bouquet of flowers commemorating the victim.

Although Sheila’s books are genuinely pacy crime thrillers, it was clear that the group of fans following her that afternoon also appreciated her creation of a whole community of characters, and were glad of the opportunity to picture those people going about their lives in a real place. And when would there be more news from the Seahills? Well, admitted Sheila, she should complete the next book, The Road to Hell, that night or the next…

No posts for the last month because Cornwell Internet has been on holiday: we were away for less than three weeks, but the few days before our departure and the few days after our return were filled with urgent tasks, meeting deadlines, picking up things that had arisen during our absence…

Nonetheless, we have definitely been on holiday, and here’s photographic evidence – Roger taking a breather during a walk around the French village of Minerve, in the heart of the Minervois wine region.

We couldn’t have done it all so seamlessly without Stephen Mellor minding the shop – and nipping crises in the bud – for us. Thank you, Stephen.

Last week’s Saturday poem in the Guardian is Lament by the wonderful Joanna Boulter. There is more about Joanna (and more of her poems) on the Arrowhead Press web site and the Vane Women web site; and her Still Life with Figs was Diamond Twig’s first ever Poem of the Month.

Lament is taken from Twenty Four Preludes & Fugues on Dmitri Shostakovich from Arc Publications, which has been shortlisted for the Forward prize for the best first collection (sponsored by Felix Dennis).

We often find ourselves wanting to add a map to a web site, and there are various ways of doing this without infringing copyright. We might use a service like Multimap to pinpoint the location where a book launch will take place; we might hand-draw a more impressionistic map of the places mentioned in a series of murder mysteries; we combine a limited number of maps from the Ordnance Survey’s Get a Map service with maps which are old enough to be out of copyright to describe the route of the Lyke Wake Walk. But sometimes there is no substitute for the detailed and authoritative maps produced by the Ordnance Survey. Unfortunately, their fee for using their maps online runs to thousands of pounds a year, way beyond the means of most of our customers.

Now the Free Our Data Campaign launched by The Guardian points out that although a licence to use digital maps is prohibitively expensive, there is a much cheaper (and I mean "much" – one fiftieth of the price, in the case they describe) licence to scan a paper map, and use the resultant image on your web site.

This isn’t a complete solution, and there are restrictions, but it still opens up new possibilities.

Is it just because I’m thinking about holidays, about travel, about visiting new places, that there seems to be a theme to web site updates I’ve made recently?

According to the information about a new anthology of poetry from Siberia I recently added to the Smokestack books site,

… Siberia is also a place of winter magic, a land of extreme natural beauty crossing seven time zones, of ice-princesses and talking bears, frozen mammoths and the shamans who walk among the dead.

One to read about rather than to visit, perhaps.

In Alan Mann’s latest dispatch from Tenerife, he ventures cautiously onto the naturist beach. There’s a fascinating rocky landscape, and the perfect picnic:

Our picnic goes down well. The scotch eggs beautifully made, the salad crisp and dressed within thin sliced brown bread, the wine in thermos flasks to keep it cold.

Sounds good – but that was then, before mass tourism came to the Canaries.

Wine, though, there’s an idea: and Helen Savage has been sending me notes of some mouth-watering tastings in the south west of France. I never knew that when grapes ripen, the pips ripen too, but it seems so:

Part of the secret, Emmanuel insists, is to pick the grapes at exactly the right moment. "As soon as the pips taste ripe you have just six to twelve hours to complete the harvest, otherwise the wine will be heavy and jammy."

Time to get out the Michelin road atlas, I think…