Category: Misc

The Home Office currently has an advertising campaign highlighting the fact that you can be charged £80 if you’re drunk and disorderly in public. To advertise this, they’ve got a charming campaign using posters and phoneboxes that cleverly spell out “£80” with vomit. It’s quite a ghastly sight. Possibly even worse than seeing a pile…

Thanks to a very generous host, I’ve just spent a week in Sweden. Read on below for a detailed, and some might say, exceptionally boring, essay on what I did there. I’d like to think of it more as a journal of my time. Others might simply conclude that it’s “What I Did In My…

I know that there has been an economic downturn, and high street chains are finding it hard to maintain profits and growth, but is that really an excuse for how busy and messy all these stores now look. WH Smith has had some notable problems of late, and for a while was torn over exactly…

You don’t know how much of a sense of achievement I had this evening when I’d finally managed to solve a “moderate” Kakuro puzzle in The Guardian. It’s the new Sudoku don’t you know. I suspect that doing these things regularly is the only real way of solving them easily.

No, I don’t mean eating in the supermarkets’ cafeteria areas. Although I always feel that if you’re eating there, you’re probably pretty desperate. And they never have all the menu available. No, what I’m talking about are those people who start consuming their soon-to-be-purchases before they’ve actually reached the till. They drive me mad. I…

Can somebody please write a script that de-Christmases sites like Amazon? All I want is the holly-festooned graphics removed or replaced…

Juicy

While the newspapers continue to spend money on promotions like it’s going out of fashion, I’m happy to reap the rewards. So this weekend, on Saturday there’s Like Water For Chocolate in The Independent, which I haven’t seen for years, but enjoyed at the time. On Sunday, the Sunday Telegraph has the slightly strange Orlando,…

I don’t know why, but it annoys me when generic bird-watchers are described as twitchers. Twitchers are that special breed of bird enthusiast who chases around the country looking for exceptionally rare speicies of birds. They’re a relatively rare breed themselves. Anyway, this is all just an excuse for me noting that there are an…

Out in the distant parts of Norfolk, you often see fighter planes out on manouevres flying low over the landscape and off over the North Sea. But today I saw something I’d never seen before: a pair of fighters, possibly F16s from Mildenhall, but they could have been Tornados, in a mock dogfight over the…

I’ve just noticed that filmmaker Alex Cox is blogging again. A while back, he used to write a weekly column for the BBC film website. He kept a weekly update of how his filmmaking was going. But probably due to the political nature that his life tended to take, he was removed, and the diary…

My Rise to Obscurity by a Mexican actor named Del Zamora and If I Don’t Write It, Nobody Else Will by Eric Sykes.

Just looking at the logs of this site and a few strange searches show up. In the last month, the most searched term is for “Hunting Chris Ryan”. That’s because I reviewed it once. But I bet this site disappoints all those who get to it when searching for “Abbie Titmuss”! I misspelt her name…