If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!In the late 1920s, having packed her daughter off to boarding school, the divorced crime novelist Agatha Christie took a train from London to Baghdad. Iraq wasn’t in such a mess back then as it is right now, so […]

It’s the last weekend of the month, so time to get out the oven gloves. Today it was ginger biscuits. Again stolen from my grandmother’s hand-written cookery book, and again rediculously easy.
Ingredients for 20 - 25 biscuits
170g (6oz) self-raising flour
Three quarters of a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
70g (2.5oz) of sugar
1 teaspoon of ground ginger
70g […]

Nicky and Gordon
I have known Gordon for as long as I’ve worked in this industry. I met him on my first day as a journalist. He set up my email account. Since then, we’ve always worked together, although not always on the same magazine, been on countless matching press trips, and of course we presented […]

The new Intel-based Macs have built-in cameras, and all run Photobooth, a snazzy little app for taking pictures for use in iChat. Naturally, when testing them, we needed to spend a good part of the day checking out the various filters and effects, just to be thorough.

Well, if it proves anything, it’s how lucky I was to get all my stuff off it in the 24 hours during which my PowerBook briefly sprung back to life. Without any warning, it booted up, not looking quite right, but at least letting me grab everything out of my mailboxes and Documents folder and […]

Since the July bombs on the tube, the police have been out in force every morning and evening at Liverpool Street, always with a perky-looking spaniel that seems to appreciate the attention.
I

James Bond: The Man and His World didn

So much for the infallible Mac. That

This was my fourth trip to Berlin, I think, but it was easily the best. It was cold, and as we came in to land it looked like we were coming down in a very barren, sun-scortched country. It was only when we saw that the river was frozen from side to side that we […]

Of course, I know that pancake day isn’t until a week on Tuesday, but Mark looked it up on the web, and somehow convinced himself it was this week instead.
So, that’s why we had the annual Tossers Ahoy party this afternoon.
After last year’s disasters it actually turned out distinctly un-messy, despite the fact he’d spread […]