G'day Chalie,

I think our eastern cousins (Billy the Bus's Kiwis ... oops! ... New Zealanders) have a claim on the Gigantic Squid (the newly discovered Really Big! one (see this weeks's New Scientist ... something about the freezing seawater in which it thrives. However John Warner does have a song about Goulburn's "giant Merino ram" ...

My G/D Lachenal is only a 22-key model ... standard diatonic "bush concertina" plus a G#/A# key on the top end of left hand 'C' row and a C#/D# button at the top end of right hand 'C' row. This is about as minimal as an Anglo-chromatic can be! It's one I rebuilt from a rather derelict B/F# ( .. ? ... ! ... ?), so there are a few soft choices in the very bottom notes of the left hand - but these are only ewer used for "vamp chords" ... so they function quite well.

I'm trying to keep as close to traditional instruments as possible ... but being very tempted to have a new Kookaburra Concertina 24-key made by Richard Evans, up at Bell in the Blue Mts (with as much slave labour as possible, by me, thrown in the discount the price!

In re JennieG's remarks about the odd venonous critter ... I had emailed "Liam's Brother", some years back, about a copperhead snake that got corrugated in a stack of roofing iron - when a friend and I were clearing old building material from a 20 acre block in the mountains, where we were organising a Bush Music Club camping weekend. Dan replied, mentioning that "We have a snake too, called a copperhead - and it's venomous!" I replied "not half as venomous as this one" and he left it at that.

Then, some months later, he emailed to say he saw a program on deadly animals ... and, of the world's 10 deadliest snakes ... 10 of them lived in Australia. Well, we just manage to maintain a healthy respect for each other ... !

Regards,

Bob Bolton