Designers’ trouble

Has any designer of a designer hotel ever actually bothered to stay in the designer hotel they designed? The reason I ask is that Sugar Magnolia and I have just spent a few nights in a designer hotel in Bordeaux (it actually called itself a ’boutique’, but the term is effectively interchangeable with ‘designer’) .…

Another year older…

My Countdown To An Event app – which is now functioning as a Countup – tells me that, as of 2 p.m. European Summer Time on September 27th, I have been retired for exactly one year. Not that I’d forgotten. It’s interesting to compare my daily timetable now with what it looked like twelve months…

Fandango’s Friday Flashback 12 September 2013Kit

Despite my well-documented inability to get to grips with technology (defined as basically anything invented since the Stone Age), I still have the inherent Y-chromosome marker for ‘kit’. Sadly, though, this thing I have going on with technology is a classic love/hate relationship. I love it, but it hates me. Gadgets, boys’ toys – call…

Fandango’ Flashback Friday As time goes by

We were mulling over recently what present to buy for our darling daughter’s eighth wedding anniversary. Seeking inspiration, not to mention enlightenment and authoritative knowledge, naturally we looked online. At anniversariesbyyear.com (yes of course there’s a web-site for it) we discovered a list of ‘wedding anniversaries gifts and ideas by year’, both traditional and modern.…

So Much Dead, So Little Time

800 and counting Dear friends and loved ones, I have new information that I guarantee is going to have you beside yourself with indifference. This week my collection of downloaded Dead shows has reached the dizzying total of 800. How do I know this and what does it all mean? Or to put it another…

Yous can take the lad owra Liverpool…

So anyroad, I wuz skivin’ around disavvy, as per, lookin’ at dis WordPress business, an’ I seen dee ‘ad this thing called a ‘Weekly Writing Challenge’. Sounded a bit poncey, if yer ask me (especially the first paragraph), burra persevered like, an’ it said dee wanted yer to write one of dem blog posts in…

Philosophy made simple

I’ve got a degree in philosophy, me. It was all a long time ago and it was taken on the basis that it was the most useless and impractical thing I could think of to do for three years at government expense (we had grants in those days, believe it or not). As it turned…

Classy

Apparently, the police department of Dubai has just overhauled its vehicle fleet, which now boasts (sic) a Lamborghini Aventador. As I understand it, this is an exceedingly expensive, achingly fashionable and almost entirely impractical sports car. The deputy director of police explained that the new vehicle is not intended for serious use but instead will…

Why this blog?

Yet another personal blog site: one of the infinite number of monkeys tapping away at their infinite number of keyboards. What’s the point? George Orwell asserted that – putting aside the need to earn a living (which happily is not applicable here) – there are four great motives for writing: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical…