The little guy in my icon, that little guy there, 13 years ago?

Here he is a couple of months ago. Big and old and lazy, but he still loves me.


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Annual public post, for reviews from the Oxford Beer Festival. This year most things were fine to pretty decent. Few stood out as exceptional discoveries, but none were truly terrible. Good fun.

Atlantic of Treisaac, Cornwall
Blue, 4.8%A dark ruby porter, alternating smells of smoke and sweet coffee on the nose. Light to drink if dark(ish) in ( Read more... )

Tasting notes from the 2013 Oxford Beer FestivalAt which for all the duplicate barrels in the world, they had run out of festival glasses by the time I arrived, which suggests an underestimate of the number of people attending, or keeping them, or both. The whole thing may be going upmarket - the Cornish pastie seller was still there, but so were a ( Read more... )

Or quite a large one. Oxford Beer Festival yesterday. A bit on the crowded side, not helped by the use of one half of the hall for serving, and the other half of the hall for beers-in-waiting. I guess it reduces the required number of staff, but... well anyway. Here's what I drank.

Bateman (Wainfleet, Lincolnshire) Salem Porter: Smooth drinking, ( Read more... )

I like making these. Sometimes I'm right, no promises. Anyway, things which will happen by Summer 2013. At some point along this list, the European Central Bank will start printing money and giving it to distressed Eurozone Governments, at which point the game changes and the predictions no longer apply ( Read more... )

I always enjoy the xkcd guide to making people feel old based on film release dates, but as most of you know films aren't really my thing. I wondered what it would look like made out of BBC sitcoms.


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I have done a number of things over the last few days to avoid working on my dissertation. Despite this, I have a first draft done and dusted and with my supervisor for comments. Possibly the most timewasting thing I have done is to download the software from Objectif Tarot and play a few hands of Tarot (which apparently in English is called " ( Read more... )

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Early one for me, playing mainly to the early birds and the people who had stayed after the Bowie tribute band ( Read more... )

Occasionally when we're doing something tedious in the office, usually stuffing envelopes addressed to MPs, we play the relations game. You take people you are contacting, and consider to whom they might be related. It's best to start off with something quite sedate and believable, for example ( Read more... )