Lazy Journalists

Normally I wouldn’t trouble these pages with news of something so desperately uncool (See! I am the Fearne Cotton of the blogging world), but just a quick mention that Sal and I saw the Finn Brothers at the Albert Hall last night (hey, get over it: I’m going out with an Antipodean, it’s what they do), if only to highlight some shockingly shabby journalism I discovered. You see, we weren’t really expecting the gig to…

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Budapest

As you might have gathered from previous posts, we spent the Easter weekend in Budapest. The weather was not kind to us, but somehow the grey overcast skies that dominate my photographs seemed rather well suited to a weekend wandering around admiring the grand old crumbling buildings and grim soviet architecture that dominate the Hungarian capital. It’s also possible that we didn’t really mind the weather conditions because the favourable sterling to HUF exchange rate…

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Thinking Things Through

Watching “Express TV”, on the Heathrow Express yesterday, as Sal and I returned from our weekend in Budapest, I was delighted to watch and hear the following announcement: “Welcome to the Heathrow Express, and welcome to Express TV… For your comfort, on this train there are a number of quiet coaches, where Express TV isn’t playing. If you are in a designated quiet coach, please refrain from using your mobile phone…”

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“Say Another Place We Know…”

Apparently Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell wrote ‘Leave Me Alone’, off their debut album on the number 29 bus. (“…Borrell worked stops from the route of the Number 29 – the London Bus he wrote the track on – into the song“) Hey! That goes right past my house. In fact, sometimes I catch that bus down to the tube, when it isn’t too busy to get on. Can’t say I’ve ever felt the inspiration to write…

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Cunning Linguists

Paris excepted, all of my recent trips to Europe have been to countries where I have no language skills whatsoever. Having got completely fed up with feeling like the stupid uneducated Brit abroad, I resolved to do something about this, and at least make some cursory efforts to learn a few words of the language of any future countries I plan to visit. My first brush with Estonian might have had to wait until we…

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The Rise of the Robots

My afternoon was enlivened considerably by an email from Camden council. Nothing to do with the contents of the email, but all to do with the fact that they have configured their email server to show just the sender’s surname in the “From:” field, and this email happens to be about my council tax account, so shows just my account number in the “Subject:” field. So this missive appears in my inbox as: From: Prime…

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Bumper Celebrity Haiku

in an old school hall celeb fame academy on my way to work It was only this morning, and I think the jumbo red nose stuck to the entrance might have been the give away, that I realised why there’s been crowds of youngsters hanging around the old lambeth college every night for the last week as I walked past it on my way home from work. Turns out, as the InterWeb confirms, that after…

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The War on Stupid

After finally getting completely fed up with the ISP that likes to charge for no service, I told Virgin.net that I’d like to move off their £25 a month “no service” plan, and picked myself a new ISP. This time, I plumped for Homechoice, who were prepared to offer me broadband at twice the speed of Virgin.net (when they deigned to provide a service at all) plus TV on demand through the phone line, at…

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The Big 10 Oh-Oh-Oh…

It’s just as well that Rob pointed it out, or I might have missed out on celebrating my 10,000th day birthday. If that’s not enough to make you feel old on a random wintery day in March, then I don’t know what is. Oh, I see that Glasto ticket details are up on the website. Basically as you were (Sunday April 3rd, 9AM, Aloud “Sorry we are experiencing Technical Difficulties, please Try Again Later” .com,…

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