You’ll need to use your imagination a bit to sing this song: Da da, da da, da da da da da da–da da, da da, dadadadadada, da da da da…got it? It’s that old classic British TV show with the original ginger-ninja Cilla Black of course! That’s right: I’m talking about Blind Date. The one, the only, the stuff that TV gold is made of…

Blind Date, the prime TV show of the 80s and 90s–I think it may Read the rest of this entry »

I think I was fairly OK as a young boy. I had my shortcomings, of course—and who can say that vaporizing ants and watching slugs burn alive isn’t quite a good way to pass the time?—but I could have turned out a lot worse. That said, one particular incident in the school dining-hall sticks in my mind. It’s something I think about often. It’s also something I am ashamed about, and always will be.

I was standing in front of Read the rest of this entry »

Word-processing software: where do the people who designed this stuff get off? I’ve been using various forms of this for many, many years and I still find myself regularly breaking down and cursing at the screen as it tries to tell me—yes ME the writer—that I don’t know what the flip I am talking about. Most days it seems as though the program doesn’t want me to write anything at all; in fact, if you look closer, it seems as Read the rest of this entry »

There are currently over a billion people in the world living off less than a dollar a day. But oddly enough, it is an issue that most people ignore, thinking that it is a futile pursuit that can never be solved. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps if the poverty could be solved than it would be solved. Perhaps having the extremely rich and desolately poor is what keeps the global economy in check. But let’s imagine a world that didn’t have Read the rest of this entry »

Biro pens, eh? There is, undoubtedly, a great and truly disturbing cover-up going on all over the world (or so you might think): you know what I am on about—this is the great disappearing biro pen conspiracy! Notice how no other pens go missing–do you? Well, that only proves my point. So what is going on?

To test my conspiracy theory I bought a brand-new pack of biro pens and kept them on the table, then allowed my family access Read the rest of this entry »

Girls love tea, they really do. Every female I have ever known has had an obsessive (teetering on perverse) fascination with collecting little bags of tea and keeping said tea in a metal box. It didn’t bother me at first, only all of these tea-females have something in common, and it only recently struck me: all of these metal boxes EXCLUDED the finest tea of them all: Yorkshire Tea, yes, “The way tea used to be”. That’s not to say Read the rest of this entry »

Time, eh? You look back and see what was what, and hopefully live and learn. When I was working in a small corner-shop at the age of sixteen, and an old-lady argued with me ferociously because “back in my day five-pounds-fifty was actually seven-pounds-ninety-two in ‘modern silly money’”, she was right, of course. What could I say? Just a mere boy! When I worked on the chicken-counter of a popular (unmentionable) supermarket and a chicken–one of my darn excellent, perfectly Read the rest of this entry »