If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!On a scale of childbirth, I think today started out as siamese twins arriving sideways. This evening was a neat and tidy caesarian, with full anaesthetic in a private ward.
I had a meeting at half ten. It should have […]

What a disaster at tonight’s Eurovision Semi Final. In fact, if you count the irritating BBC commentator, what a pair of disasters. Where they find him from, I have no idea, but he actually managed to make Terry Wogan sound quite good, and that’s no mean feat.
No, the real disaster, of course, was the Netherlands […]

I’m getting quite good at this swimming lark. I did another 2km tonight - that’s a mile and a quarter. By the end my legs were starting to ache, but after the first 50 lengths I’d got into a good rhythm and was zizzing backwards and forwards as though it was something I’d been doing […]

I swam a mile today. Now I know that’s not a great achievement for a lot of people, but as a casual swimmer I’m actually quite pleased with myself, especially as I only intended to do 30 lengths.
A mile is 80 lengths, and if it wasn’t closing I could probably have gone to 100 (2km) […]

My new passport arrived in an anonymous brown envelope stuffed full of useful documents about getting help when you’re abroad, and hints and tips on what to do to keep yourself safe.
There was another piece of paper in there too, though, which showed how they’d come up with the seemingly random (and somewhat extortionate) cost […]

I spent tonight learning to play Mancala.
Actually, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I spent tonight playing Macala, as learning it only takes about five minutes, after which you’re away (and hooked).
It’s dead simple. You have seven small pits in front of you. Six of these hold small stones - four in each to begin […]

Well, the sky was supposed to be a firey red tonight, and perhaps beyond the clouds it was. I set out in the car to get away from the street lights and find somewhere dark enough to see the eclipse properly, and after an hour or so of driving ended up on the flight-path into […]

I ache.
Largely on account of stupidly, stupidly going swimming two days in a row after not having been for weeks and weeks. Last time I did I sneezed two days later, just as the ache was starting to subside and it felt for the next week like I’d dislocated a lung.
I don’t know why I […]

On the last day of the week-long spam count, the spammers have really surpassed themselves. I had been expecting about 800 messages, taking the total to just less than 5,000 for the week, but at 1,526, they’ve sent roughly the same in one day as they did in the whole of the first three days […]

So the penultimate day of the week-long spam count brings in 871 new messages. If it carries on at this rate it’ll tip over 5,000 for the week by tomorrow evening, at which point it’s time to start looking for a new host with better spam filtering. So much for the assumption that most […]