In the end it only took me an extra hour to get home last night. I may have waited 20 minutes for a train that didn’t come; got a bus to a tube that wasn’t going anywhere; sat on the tube for 10 minutes in the station; got off the tube; shared a taxi to Islington; got on another (surprisingly on-time and quick) train to Richmond; and finally got another taxi home, but it could…

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When we finally got there, after spending a fun-filled 5 1/2 hours hanging around Gatwick while Air Europa fixed the dodgy left engine on the plane we had almost left on (there’s only so much sock shopping one person can do, and 5 hours is pretty much the limit), we discovered that Madrid is a lovely city. It may be oppressively hot at times, but if you need to cool down you can always catch…

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Orange jacket bloke at entrance to V2003 arena: You can’t bring that in here [points to 2 litre plastic water bottle in my hand] Me: Why not? We brought it in yesterday. [This is true] Orange jacket bloke: Well you must have hidden it or something. [This is not true]. You can’t bring that in here. If you look on the back of your ticket it says you can’t bring more than 1 litre of…

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I’ll probably be writing something a bit later on about this weekend’s excellent V festival (sorry Rob, ‘fraid you missed a goodun) with only a slight rant about the outright extortion (£3 a beer and your only choice of beer is Budweiser? come on…), and the generally poor organisation/silly rules enforced by jobsworths in orange coats. For now, though, I will mostly be drinking coffee and trying to do some work. You may want to…

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Fair and Balanced

Today, I am reliably informed, is “Fair and Balanced” day on the Internet. In response to the decision by the (un)fair and (un)balanced Fox News to sue a US satirist for breaching the trademark they claim to hold over the English-language sentence “Fair and Balanced” (he’s about to publish a book called “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right“), people all over the world are creatively…

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