If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!I called Mark and Ja from my delayed train yesterday evening to warn them I was going to be late for dinner. It’s just as well I did. I arrived at theirs at eight (due at half seven), just […]

What a beautiful morning. Not so much for the weather, which was generally grey and grumpy, as for the time it started. The alarm didn’t go off until 7.20, and I didn’t wake up until it had been irritating the neighbours for a full fifty minutes.
Marvellous.
Even better was the fact that it didn’t make me […]

By the time I left the flat, Chelmsford was in the grip of a vicious traffic jam that snaked right through the town. The A12 had been closed for some reason or other, so that’s the only alternative. It’s quite impressive to see all the cars and trucks snaking down the hill and past the […]

The cheese winder continues to prove elusive. We drove down to Basildon today. The rain and traffic only made it worse. A man with a wide plank of wood turned around at the back of the queue for the Homebase cash desk and smacked it into me as I walked past with my little green […]

On the radio they are saying the gale-force winds we’ve had today are common for this time of year. They don’t even seem to be surprised by the tornadoes. Apparently it happened exactly eleven years ago, too, on Burns night, and back then it was more destructive than the storm Michael Fish promised the nation […]

I witnessed a birth today. A very beautiful thing. It was just as we were leaving work. Jason and Leo had already headed on over to the pub, the rest of the team had gone home, and there was just me and Mark in the office when it happened.
Mark is very proud. It’s the first […]

Well, this morning was a whole new experience, doing the breakfast show trail by ISDN rather than over the phone. I took the battery out of my clock, turned off the water boiler and considered unplugging the freezer for ten minutes to stop the background noise, but in the end it stopped its whirring just […]

A rather complex set of graphs was doing the rounds just after lunch. In some of the pie charts the colours of more than one section were the same, so you couldn’t tell which yellow section told you what. I did my usual thing of getting clockwise and anti-clockwise mixed up when explaining to Leo […]

It looked like it was going to be grotty, but as I was on the tube the clouds all seemed to disappear and by the time I came back above ground at Tottenham Court Road station the sky was a beautiful clear blue and the sun was shining brightly.
I decided to avoid Benjy’s, or the […]

News in Briefs. One simple typo that could do wonders for Sky’s viewing figures.
Well, my weekend of clearing tedius but necessary jobs seems to have followed through into the start of the week. I did the gym and read almost the whole of the large and less manageable section of The Guardian on the way […]