Tony, have to take you to task on your comments that reading what others do or advise is a waste and much of it is crap. As a novice and without tuition of some sort the only way to get up the learning curve to the point where fishing is a real pleasure is to read, read, read, and then get on the water as much as possible of course and put what you have read into practice and adjust as necessary. The distilled knowledge that I have found on this site has been incredibly helpful in getting me up to speed and if I had found it a bit sooner it would have saved me some money also. And all for free!
I appreciate that to become a half decent angler I will have to learn from my own mistakes and successes, but ideas on how to fine tune can, I believe, just as easily come from someone else's experience as one's own.
So add your crap to the rest and let us all have a wallow!