On the fish front I had a bad couple of months loosing several of the established fish some of which I'd had for years all for different reasons, then the first batch of new fish nearly all died as a result of Columnaris which took weeks to sort out, leaving me with 2 large mostly empty tanks, with a lot of other things going on including (but not restricted to) my little staffy going on end of life care for skin cancer, a two week holiday, redesign of the garden, fracturing my finger, plus voluntary redundancies at work led me to find a good home for the remaining fish and to shut the tanks down completely
This did not last long, straight away I missed having them and after a few weeks the 350l was back up and running, I will have to stick to one tank until I am in a more secure job so the other one got sold,
I had kept the more robust plants and most décor so all I had to do was get new substrate, the first bag I ordered online was a much lighter colour than I expected, so it was a quick trip to the LFS to get whatever black stuff they had in, which happened to be JBL Monado, there is no soil underneath so I will be interested to see how the plants get on, tank looks bare at the moment but hopefully will fill out over time,
Regarding fish, this will be a community, there isn't a theme as such, but I would like to primarily concentrate on bottom feeders - Catfish/ pleco/ loaches and the like, since I now have gravel Cory are out, but most types were not suited to my water anyway, this also applies to L number plecos, but I have been researching for a good few weeks now and have come up with a good number of options on a possibilities list, I do love a bit of research, most are not so easy to find, I will be unlikely to come across many in my LFS - I like to make things difficult for myself! But a good number of the bigger stores also do postage so that is an option.
A few weeks ago I got my first fish
1 Pleco and 4 tiny hovering loach - it's all they had left, I had these loach before and really liked them, I did plan to get more when the shop gets some but now I think they are going to be too small for most catfish so I better not get any more. 
These are now ready to come out of QT, so recently I took a trip to Wharf after reserving some African Banded Barbs I had seen listed on their stock lists, I also kept these fish before, had them ages, they stick to the bottom area of the tank and behave much like a loach, since I was there of course I found some others that I liked, including torpedo loach and Synodontis Petricola (which I also kept before) Everybody is together in QT as I did not want to try and feed just a couple, of currently tiny, bottom feeders in a large tank.
Will attach pic of tank as it is now, not much to look at but I hope to add in some caves and pipes and possibly more plants soon
