Category: life

A new branch of Pizza Express opened in Balham over the weekend and we went in to try it out last night. Whilst I was looking around the restaurant, my eyes were drawn to a decoration on the wall which consisted of an apparently random pattern of spotlights that were shining through a wooden panel… Continue reading Bizarre Branding

Whilst you’re reading all of the tributes to John Paul II that will inevitably appear over the next few days, it’s worth bearing in mind a few things. Over the twenty-seven years of his reign this pope has wasted no opportunity to reinforce the catholic church’s medieval views on contraception, abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality. Probably… Continue reading John Paul II

I’m ill and I’m grumpy, so this site hits my current mood nicely. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who hates to hear restaurant staff and customers singing “Happy Birthday” to some hapless soul sitting in their midst. The people who run Unhappy Birthday also dislike this as much as I… Continue reading Unhappy Birthday

I just had a bit of an adventure with the HSBC Bank and I’ve discovered a couple of things that might be of interest to other customers. On Monday I paid a rather large cheque into the Holborn Circus branch of the HSBC. For various reasons it was important that this cheque cleared as quickly… Continue reading Advice for HSBC Customers

(Please forgive me a vaguely sentimental entry. We’ll be back to our usual cynicism later I promise.) Today was my stepdaughter’s eighteenth birthday. She was eight when I first met her. It’s been an interesting journey with only a very small number of bumps. I never wanted to have children of my own and I… Continue reading Eighteen

I don’t expect this to get much national news coverage, but comedian Malcolm Hardee has died (in slightly strange and very hardee-esque circumstances). I spent a lot of the 90s hanging around the periphery of the London comedy circuit. I never knew Malcolm but I knew many people who did. A lot off people who… Continue reading Malcolm Hardee

You know, I admit to being a bit sceptical when I first set up my Tada lists, but I have to say that it seems to be working. Over the weekend, despite one of my servers crashing completely and me spending far too much time running fdisk and changing DNS records, I managed to tick… Continue reading Tada Lists Success

We have a rich and expressive language and therefore it annoys me intensely to hear people using it inaccurately. Two recent examples. Firstly, the woman from Kent who was interviewed on the BBC news this morning. She has flown to the USA to support Michael Jackson in his hour of need because “I know he… Continue reading English As She Is Spoke

As part of my eternal struggle to organise my life, I’ve started building lists at Tada Lists. I’ve even made some of them public. (Oh, bit of an inconvenient little bug in the system. I originally linked to my public lists at http://davorg.tadalists.com/lists/public/, but it seems that the site doesn’t like the existance of that… Continue reading Tada List

An interesting example of how the internet is shrinking the world. The photographer who took a photo of a photographer