One minute is calibrated in length by the number of oscillations a Caesium atom makes at a laboratory in France somewhere*.
However, the subjective length of a minute is different to:
– a person waiting a minute for their train to arrive (slightly slower than a standard minute).
– a person on a train which has stopped at a signal and will be on the move in a minute (approximately 2 minutes 30 seconds).
– a person whose train leaves in a minute, who isn’t yet at their train station (vastly …

Ordinarily I’d eschew the “Parish Newsletter” format – however the simple fact is I’ve done bugger all in the way of blogging this year, and it’s certainly not been due to any lack of activity at this end! The dearth of electronic reportage has been, in part, brought on by my lack of available spare time – let it never be said that there’s any shortage of things to do in London!
Week in Scotland
We got the year off to a brilliant start with a holiday in one of the less …

Following the recent post on the books I read in 2011, here’s a roundup of all the movies that I saw this year.  I’ll highlight the ones wot I saw in the cinema, somehow.  As mentioned previously, this is sort of inspired by Billy’s post of a similar nature last year.
And because it’s not just going to be a dry list, you’ll have to endure my commentary along with it.  Who wants to just read a damn list, anyway?
Films I saw in 2011
(* means watched on a plane, ** means …

Is this about the time of year I usually apologise for falling miles behind on bloggery?  I just re-read that Edinburgh post from about 3 weeks back and realised that the promised forthcoming detail entirely wasn’t…  but it’s not a new thing, because in a variety of notebooks and scraps of paper I’ve got embryonic posts dating back as far as the snow trip we went on to France back in about February-ish!
The primary thing I’m facing at the minute is what you might term an Ongoing Logistical Nightmare.
In February …

Anyone waiting for buses recently in Vauxhall would have seen a fairly imposing billboard, and it’s the sort of thing which signals to me that I must be getting older, because instead of not giving 2 shits about it, seeing it sends me into apoplectic paroxysms of rage:

The principle at stake is the upcoming referendum about whether the UK should replace its current “First Past The Post” voting system (FPTP) with a system called “Alternative Voting” (AV).
For those who don’t know what that’s all about – the UK currently uses an …

Whilst perambulating about the lovely city of Bristol the other day we stumbled past a reasonably fetching barber shop.  Stumbled upon isn’t quite the right word.  We weren’t really stumbling at that point of the evening, so it’s not like we were stumbling and then went past it…  it was more just that we were walking along, noticed the shop, and I forced everybody to stop and look because I thought it might be cool.
If I’m honest about it, the thing which caught my attention was the yesteryear-stylee clock protruding …

Someone really should set up a museum of museums.  Y’know, a sort of look through the ages (or at least since the 17th Century, when wikipedia would have you believe musea started to pop up) at the different ways in which humans have elected to catalog and display their antiquities.  Not that it’s obvious how you’d mount an exhibition depicting going from private collections, all the way through to the interactive all-singing, all-dancing innovations which we currently queue up for at half-term week if we’ve been foolish enough to time …

Wow.  I just checked to see what blog entries I’d left unfinished lately, and spotted one from early May detailing how I’d been too busy to write about anything and giving dotpoints of the sort of thing that’s been going on round here.
Of course, as is now plainly obvious, I’ve been so busy I haven’t had a chance to finish the post.
There you go – self-referential supporting evidence.
Now – HTC Desire, or iPhone 4?

I tell ya what, if ever you’re feeling short of the luuuurve I can definitely recommend signing up with a Facebook account, and having a birthday.  My inbox today looks a little like this:
You guys seriously rock.  It’s humbling, and you’re all awesome.  And it’s gonna take ages to respond to each one, but y’know – me’ mum taught me to be polite.
Special mention to Douggy for the best gift (so far) today: this handsome Virtual Spatula.

I’m still here, don’t panic.
Once again the ever present problem rears its head where there’s so much going on and so many cool things to do & people to see that there’s not time to blog about any of it.
Currently I’m sitting in Singapore’s Changi Airport trying not to spend any money, and desperately trying not to strangle the exceptionally loud little turd running around about 1.5 metres to my 5-o’clock.  You’d think he’d be tired by now, given how long he’s been doing that.  I assure you, it’s not …