If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!One guy bet another, several years ago, that he couldn’t cross the river at Maldon and eat his Christmas dinner on the opposite bank, in the middle of the mud. The bettee accepted, and the better lost. The following […]

So dad left yesterday afternoon. Around half fourish, to give him time to return the hire car and catch his flight. We went out for lunch at Ricardo’s to mark the end of his trip. Good food, nice surroundings, slow slooow service. Town was pretty packed. Long queues into the car parks and hundreds of […]

Two days of eating. Far, far too much eating. It started yesterday morning - Christmas morning - after Dad had dropped me off at mum’s. My car was sitting on the drive, having been fixed (and serviced) and it looked suspiciously like it had been washed.
So, breakfast in the conservatory, then lots of texting Christmas […]

Tesco, last night, was absolutely heaving. Long queues at the checkouts at midnight, and not much more than a dozen spaces left in the car park. Looks like everyone left their shopping until late - it was probably empty at half seven.
In spite of the late night spending, though, was up early this morning, and […]

The online poll on the This is London site today asked how much work you were going to do - none at all, only when the boss is watching, it’s a notmal day, or as much as Santa’s elves. 6% of the population took option four, including the eight of us in the office. The […]

So, the last edition of The Lab on Thursday, and the final London This Week today. As usual, it was raining outside, as it does every Sunday I have to be in Grays Inn Road, and as usual the show went far too fast to think about anything other than what the next question would […]

Three hours. That’s how long it took to wrap my Christmas presents. I started just after lunch and finished, one cup of tea, two of coffee, and several albums later with aching knees from sitting on the floor all afternoon.
So, after several hours of sitting down, I made plans for some… sitting down, and went […]

The world is off sick. Or on holiday. At one point today there was just three of us in the office. There’s a particular nastiness going around at the moment, seemingly impervious to whatever anti-death medicine you choose to throw at it, trapping those who weren’t off using their last few days of free time […]

Seven Questions is a site that does just what it says on the tin. It conducts interviews, just seven questions long, with a variety of interesting or unusual people, such as Jon Anderson. Jon was a nuclear missile commander during the cold war. He sat through shifts in his bunker ready with his key and […]

Congratulations to open-minded Ananova for managing to reinforce two stereotypes in one story. A short report on a Dutch DJ’s efforts to earn himself a place in the Guinness Book of Records closes with the sentence:
A spokesman for Guinness World Records says it is not necessary to undergo a drugs test to be counted as […]