Now we are One With the impending first anniversary of my blog on Tuesday, and this being my 200th post (yes, really), I thought it would be appropriate to pause for a moment of gentle reflection. In February 2003 (the earliest month for which I still have statistics for the pastemagazine.org domain), we were getting a daily average of 28 visits* a month. This has risen steadily over the course of the year to a…

Continue reading

“I don’t climb poles, and you won’t find another engineer who does…” At the second time of asking, BT finally managed to connect a small piece of wire from the box in the downstairs hallway in our flat to the very large telegraph pole outside, thus providing us with a working telephone service. You’d think this would be a reasonably simple exercise, but apparently it’s not–it takes almost three hours, and requires any number of…

Continue reading

Last night we visited our local, the Hemingford Arms, for the first time, ably assisted by Dave and Pete, who were over to visit. I’ve never really had a local before–the Kensington on Stanley Road in Redland would be the closest thing, I suppose, but it was always just that bit too far from my student accommodation to qualify (notwithstanding our consistent pub quiz successes), so I was rather pleased to find that the pub…

Continue reading

ILTEOTS Exploring our new neighbourhood on Saturday afternoon, I was reminded of a classic Simpsons moment. It’s a literal visual gag of the kind at which the show’s writers excel, in an episode where Bart runs away–you see him walking along the street and gradually getting further and further away from home. Eventually he crosses some railway tracks, and by the time he has reached the other side of the tracks (the wrong side, presumably),…

Continue reading

All I can hear is people typing around me, even above the sound of REM on my MP3 player, but I’m not sure I can find the motivation on this drab Friday afternoon to explain in better English why you need to read the fantastically dull Protocols Porting Guide I’m writing. Is it really only the end of the first week back after the New Year? It seems like I’ve never been away. Even worse,…

Continue reading

Unconnected events Two recent, but unconnected events, that have been troubling me recently. The first one happened at Rob’s excellent New Year’s Eve do (a party where, I’m afraid to report, this happened). The first words I heard, on being introduced to Rob’s friend Alex, a man I’d never met before, were “ah! the blogger”, as he shook my hand. Proceeding then to chat to someone I hadn’t met before who knew so much about…

Continue reading

Schadenfreude-tastic Ah. Nothing wards away the back-to-work winter blues like finding out that your old company is being delisted from the Nasdaq after its failure to file its accounts this week and its decision to launch an enquiry into its expense accounting over the last four years. [According to this report, assisting them in their investigation will be “forensic accountants” from Deloitte & Touche. Wow! Forensic accountants! Do they like take fingerprints of old documents,…

Continue reading

Enduring Love, Actually It occurred to me, watching the closing credits of Richard Curtis’s latest steaming turd of a movie on Saturday night, that it was rather ironic, actually, that a film whose central message was that, hey, love is all around, actually, guys, in fact filled me with a sense of bilious hatred the like of which I haven’t experienced in some time. I’m not sure what it was I hated most about the…

Continue reading