Leaving aside momentarily the whole issue of me being a mavericky fugitive type for taking a photograph in the Underground*: the other day whilst waiting for the usual 3 or 4 minutes until the next train (I love this town!) I spied this particularly unctuous poster, which I hadn’t seen before.

For the benefit of those with dodgy eyesight, the text reads “These chemicals won’t be used in a bomb because a neighbour reported the dumped containers to the Anti-Terrorist hotline”.  There was a companion to this further up the platform, …

I suspect I need to be careful how I go about phrasing this, so as a preamble – if you could endeavour to interpret this post mainly as bewildered head scratching and attempting to come to grips with something I’m just not getting the hang of, rather than an outraged “I can’t believe it, what IS the world coming to?!” type of arrangement, then that would be perfect.
OK, so British actor Sir David Jason – famous for his 45+ year career comprising such gems as Danger Mouse, The Darling Buds …

This evening I went against my better judgement and, after alighting from the bus from Oxford in a state of extreme peckishness (at 10:30 on a Sunday night), thought I’d pop in to KFC for a bit of quick grub.  In “So I Married An Axe Murderer” Mike Myers utters the question “How could you hate The Colonel?” – well, if what I saw tonight is an indication of the direction The Colonel’s intending to move, then we’ve found our answer.
Aside from the layout of this particular KFC being a …

An ongoing war of wills has been going on between me and our front door knocker for about the last 7 or 8 months, and I’m embarrassed but not surprised to admit that the doorknocker is presently winning.  In fact, this weekend’s battle proved to be quite a savage blow from the forces of darkness.

On our front door we have a nice big heavy brass doorknocker.  It’s in the shape of a lion’s head, and the knocker-ring thing sits in the lion’s mouth.  At some point last year one of …

‘Tis the gently beating wings of my old guardian, The Fuckup Fairy. I ought to have learned by now it’s pointlss to try to get to airports.
Today, however, she’s pulled off a rare confluence of subtle cockups, and it would be both unfair & out of character of me not to share them all with you. Probably in chronological order.
You see, to get to Dublin, the combination of services I needed to make use of was:

London Underground
A train system of some sort
Ryanair

Stop. I know you’re going to …

No surprises there then.  London, a city which has had a few days of snow pretty much every year I’ve been here, gets a bit of snow and grinds to almost a complete standstill.  As if to celebrate, Transport for London cancelled all buses today, and the Underground kept on running as best it could.  I say “running”.  It’d be closer to “a half-sideways stunted lurch, akin to that of an elderly hunchback with a club foot & dragging a piano filled with granite”.
There’s no denying that snow (or as …

I’m always bewildered by the daily displays of outrage portrayed in the British press (although some papers are worse culrpits than others): today I’ve read about outrage over prisoners being given a standup comedy course, uproar over a topless photo in a Cambridge student magazine, bankers DISGUSTING sex & drug spree, and of course the ever-present Ross/Brand/Sachs story.  Although when I think about it, I wonder if these outpourings of outrage are just a series of “this is the last straw!” moments as people around the country get fed up …

I’m not very good at being sick. Don’t get the practice, you see.
England’s not a fun place to get sick, as I found out a few years ago during the great morris dancing calf muscle insurance giggle ordeal. This time though instead of forking out 8000 squid for a 90 second appointment, I’d do the thing you’re meant to do and register with a doctor.
I thought I’d apply some logic to the exercise and use google maps to locate the nearest doctor – doctors here only serve a certain local …

Seems I misunderestimated the massive and wideranging talents of the Royal Mail.
Got a card through the door to say “we tried to deliver a parcel but it wouldn’t fit through your letter box – come & get it!”, so I did.  Well, I nearly did.  I went to the postal depot and handed over the red card.  The bloke went around behind into the parcel section and rummaged for a good 20 mins, then came back empty handed.  Even the little gnomes at Argos have better performance statistics than that!
The …