It's been a strange year or two for someone who has followed the fortunes of the England cricket team for about twenty years. This week the England test captain was presented with a trophy to represent the fact that the team is officially the best in the world. Supporters brought up on valiant rearguard actions and the occasional stirring victory ( ( Read more... )

A conversation (which the other participant maintains I have edited) during a very nice meal last Friday ( Read more... )

One of the national newspapers ran a cartoon last week of Death, sitting on a beach, with a chess board in front of him on which the pieces were strewn everywhere. It took me a little while to work out what the cartoonist was doing, possibly because my rather overly literal mind was hampered by the fact that the film is Swedish. I'm still not sure ( Read more... )

On Tuesday night I was in a club, and was being encouraged by a friend to join him in a move to another club. Now had this been at about two in the morning and the clubs nightclubs, I don't think I would be all that happy with myself. However, it also feels wrong that it was at nine in the evening, and the move being countenanced was from the RAC ( Read more... )

Another busy weekend. Cooking lunch for friends, cocktails with other friends, then a wedding to go to today. One might ask how we manage to find the time for all of this. Well, the current crow/squirrel/cat three-way territorial battle over the tree in our garden might be helping us to get up at a decent time at the weekend ( Read more... )

On Thursday, there will be local elections in the United Kingdom. Well, in some places. Scotland and Wales will be electing their Parliament and Assembly, very significant bodies, while London will have no local elections at all, barring the occasional by-election for a local councillor. And yet everyone in the country has received a polling card, ( Read more... )

Sadly, a new record for low attendance at the book group was achieved yesterday, with only me and the person selecting the book turning up. I had received emails from other members telling me that they had not liked, or finished, the book, and the person who chose it said that had it not been her choice she might also not have read it to the end. ( Read more... )

It has been common during my morning walks in recent weeks for me to see a police presence between the river and my work. For a while at the beginning of the year it was due to an exercise in making sure that cyclists were following traffic signals at one particular junction, but recently there has been no obvious purpose, especially on the ( Read more... )

One of the bad things about doing a philosophy course outside the normal university environment is that you don't receive the support of an academic library. So I've been pretty much relying on reading the set texts and muddling along. Then again, the lecturer did recommend a series of podcasts that I haven't had time to listen to, so the chances ( Read more... )

The postal DVD company continues to send weekly films, which is a credit to the second class post getting the discs back and forth but a little confusing at this point considering that we're only supposed to be receiving three discs a month. Perhaps we'll have a week off this week, which might not be a bad thing. Although things have been improving ( Read more... )