Lordy, Sarah Beeny has aged since the last series of Property Ladder. Her skin has crinkled up like filo pastry, which was especially alarming tonight as she kept narrowing her eyes and wrinkling her forehead at Ms Posh and Mr Henpecked-of-Posh of Islington ( Read more... )

If you arrive home from work, and there’s a charming multicoloured animal halfway between kitten and cat sitting on your doorstep, as if waiting for you to come home, don’t think about giving it a stroke. And if you give it a stroke, and a nuzzle behind the ear, and it rubs up against you, don’t think “ahh, that’s the kind of kitten I would like if ( Read more... )

So the last six months went something like this.

Sleep. I once watched an episode of QED on sleep, not as good as the one on the Turin Shroud (which spooked me out, and I expected to see the shadow of a bearded man on my duvet cover that night) or the one where they made people firewalk while reciting “cool wet grass”, but notable for an ( Read more... )

Japan was wonderful - well designed, friendly, exciting. It made me remember that Bedfordshire life is not the only life, and that other people might have got the hang of living well better than we have here. Mind you, driving home from the airport we saw a sign tacked to a lamppost on a suburban street: “Have you lost a cat?” with a scanned ( Read more... )

You know your batteries need charging when you start sleeping at 10pm on Friday night, wake up at midnight and realise you’re not in bed but in fact sleeping in front of QVC’s Creative Cards hour, then go to bed and sleep until 11am. I could have stayed in bed all day, but the sunlight beckoned us to local idyll Stockgrove Park, where dogs bark ( Read more... )

Let’s hope that the owners of the Hockliffe village shop don’t base their annual stock forecast on this weekend’s sales, as if they do they’ll be ordering 40,000 Soleros too many. We cleared the shop of Soleros, Feasts, Strawberry Mivis and ice-pops by approximately 10am on Saturday, to refresh ourselves as we carried, hauled, and occasionally ( Read more... )

On Wednesday evening, in the garden of the grammatically inept Buckinghamshire public house The Grove Lock (“delay on hot meal’s approx up to 30 mins”), I was bitten by an earwig. “Ha ha ha” said strange_powers and d_sameboy as they polished off my chips while I examined the earwig for evidence of radioactive contamination. Or recently emptied egg sacs. You can’t be ( Read more... )

Driving 400 miles in one day isn't so hard. Age 21, I was asked to accompany some clients to a software development exhibition in Switzerland. As I'd never flown before, a friend and I did a test flight to Edinburgh and back to ensure I wouldn't freak out at the sight of a folded tray table. In these early days of EasyJet's popularity, we found a ( Read more... )

“We now see the most dismal Piece of Ground for Travelling, that ever was in England… namely from the Top of the chalky hill beyond Dunstable down into Hockley lane, and through Hockley, justly called Hockley in the Hole...”

Daniel Defoe, Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, 1724.


( Read more... )

Happy Birthday, strange_powers...