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Great Court at the British Museum
I used to be a once-a-week regular at the British Museum - so much so that I got bought a coffee there by a couple of BBC researchers after someone to chat with for […]

So the new Bond film is called Quantum of Solace. A strange choice, it sounds like sci-fi, but the actual story behind the name was nothing of the sort. It first appeared as a short tale in For Your Eyes Only, the volume of stories that also contained A View to a Kill.
But just as […]

We watched Goldfinger at the weekend. Rich had never seen it before, but he made a very good point: Bond doesn’t actually do anything.
M and the Governor of the Bank of England put him on to Goldfinger, so he does nothing there. Felix points him out in Miami, so he doesn’t even have to stalk […]

I was late for work this morning. Why? Because the route I cycle to the station was flooded.
It’s been raining for days, and it was inevitable there would be a slight delay before the main wash made it down to us. As I came out of the house and cycled into the nature reserve and […]

Ten days. It’s been a while, hasn’t it. It’s been a very strange start to the year, though. We all went down with family colds, and then just as we got over them a new one struck and took down half of us all over again. It must have been a different one because you […]

I cycle to the station and back each day. It’s one of the best parts of the day, and it’s certainly faster than either walking or driving. It’s not a long journey, but until now I’ve never really known how far it is. I was guessing a mile or so, and I wasn’t far out.
The […]

Oscar seems to have settled into a fairly set routine. He comes down for breakfasts, hangs around for a bit of a chat (very one-sided, as it’s all meowing from him), then naps under the bed in room 2 for most of the day and, in the evening, comes down for dinner and a bit […]

Well there’s a surprise. The meticulously-planned works that have kept Liverpool Street station closed since 23rd December have over-run. The bridge they were removing has gone, and the scheduled upgrades to a handful of stations have been completed, but now they have problems with the overhead lines, and the station is stranded, cut off from […]

We didn’t spend it in New York, Paris or Rome. We didn’t fly to Edinburgh for Hogmanay. We didn’t buy fireworks, or tickets to an expensive pub that would welcome you through its doors for free any other night.
Instead we spent new year at home, with the cat, some warm sloppy camembert fresh from the […]