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Anyone for Christmas leftovers?

Nice hat, Sir! Twas the night before Christmas (well, almost) and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a m... hang on a second! Are you telling me that the rodent population not only understand the concept of stirring, but are also familiar with the idea of time and therefore know when Christmas is?! I think we may have vastly underestimated them, and it probably explains why cheese-baited traps aren’t very successful. It’s that very special time of the year –when you turn the TV on, hopeful that you’re about to get a new Christmas-themed episode of your favourite show, only to discover that it’s a ‘bonus’ outing recorded in August, featuring the ‘best of’ bits you’ve already seen, and some leftover new stuff and outtakes you haven’t (largely because they weren’t good enough to make the original show). This column is a bit like that... except the ‘best of’ part doesn’t exist. Moving swiftly on... January: In order to accurately research this column,

Losing the plot at the allotment

I have a dream. A dream where the green fingered come together to make something beautiful (assuming the slugs don’t get it first). There may only be 16 plots in our humble village allotment site, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a thing of loveliness, does it? An oasis of tranquillity, carefully tilled soil, green shoots of promise, and the occasional cheery Robin perched on a frosty spade handle for effect. So keen are the keepers of the sacred scrolls that even sheds are not allowed to blight this patch of serene calmness, split only by the occasional shriek of Mrs G putting her hand on a Slow Worm in the long grass. True, the bountiful fruitfulness, and plentiful... er... vegetableiness does attract some local deer who wander in from time to time, no doubt impressed by the neatness and the fact that some kindly humans have generously provided them with a neatly arranged salad bar. In an attempt to politely deter them from scoffing the carefully grown and tended produc

Things that go bang in the night

What were the strange ‘explosions’ heard nationwide last Saturday night? Fireworks? Experimental Spy plane? Alien invasion?! I suppose if it was the latter, we would probably know about it by now. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from science fiction shows, it’s that your average alien doesn’t hang around for a while observing – they get straight in there with the killing or probing. Or both, depending on how annoyed they are with Bruce Willis. Having said that, they were a bit more discreet in 1990s paranoia-fest the X-Files, and merely wanted to control mankind. That might explain why it’s taken until now for Gillian Anderson to randomly take all her clothes off on television. But I digress. The pulses of bangs at about 10pm last Saturday were widely heard, with many people assuming it was just a random fireworks display, with one rather unusual feature; you couldn’t actually see it. Whilst Twitter did it’s brilliant thing of pulling together lots of people who all want

F1’s surprise dignity in defeat

So Lewis Hamilton is F1 World Champion 2014. Congratulations to him, but even more so to his rival, Nico Rosberg. That’s F1 all done and dusted until next year, then. You can’t fail to have noticed Britain’s Lewis Hamilton all over the papers, TV and internet following his 2nd World Championship title success in Abu Dhabi last Sunday. He’s certainly had to wait for title number two – his first came in 2008,when he was a fresh-faced McLaren youngster, and looked a lot less like the cool-dude, diamond-ear stud wearing favourite of the press, with the Pussycat Doll girlfriend and chronic mood swings, that he has become since he joined the dominant Mercedes team. He deserved it, too. His team-mate, Nico Rosberg, had an identical mind-blowingly expensive motor, but managed less than half the number of race victories of the man across the expanse of immaculately polished garage floor. As early as round 3 the friends from karting days were working hard on destroying their relatio

Let the train take the strain (and multiply it)

I had a lovely break – thanks for asking. Friends, family, pizza and industrial quantities of coffee. But oh, the trains... Planning our jaunt down to the Shires, we concluded that sitting in a traffic jam on the M6 was undesirable. “Let’s take the train!” we thought. Watching the countryside zip by, relaxing, reading a book – what could be better? Arrive unruffled and de-stressed. Our time away included the amusing delight of being told by my 6 year old niece I couldn’t be a fairy (or have wings) and had to be a troll instead – harsh but fair, I think you’ll agree. We also took in both Ikea and John Lewis in one day – I became kitchenware blind after the first three hours, and kept mumbling “Ooo - that’s a good idea” at inappropriate moments. But it was great, and we have a new bath mat. Before all that, we had the nightmare of a power failure between Lancaster and Preston. After two hours of travel, we’d only got as far as the former. Four hours in, we made it to the l

Out of office auto column

Hello. I’m away on holiday right now – unless you’re a burglar. If so, I’m fetching the baseball bat I keep in the cellar and practising my swing. As I am enjoying some vaguely deserved time off, catching some sun and warmth in the south of Oxfordshire and bits of Hampshire, I’m clearly not able to write a newspaper column this week. (Whoever said “Nothing new there, then” I’m watching you.) Instead, this is the journalistic equivalent of that annoying “Out of Office” message you always seem to get when you email someone about something really urgent. In an effort to ensure the impossibly high standard of quality you have come to expect from me is retained, I’ve tried to cover as many news stories as possible in advance, leaving you with some multiple choice options to drop in to fit whatever has you hurling abuse and the cat at the TV this Friday night. For example, this one should set the scene nicely: What about that insert name here ? Honestly, isn’t it about time th

F1 on the fast track to failure

2 races to go, and Lewis Hamilton might be about to become Formula 1 World Champion! All good in F1-land then, right? Er... no. As the teams and drivers prepare for this weekend’s Grand Prix in Brazil, the championship is finely balanced. British hero Lewis Hamilton knows the title can’t be decided at this penultimate race, but will go down to the wire in Abu Dhabi. A great result against his arch-rival Nico Rosberg this Sunday would, in any other year, guarantee his name being added for a second time to the list of World Champions. Unfortunately, someone thought it would be a good idea to award double points in the last race, so he’ll have to hang on for an extra couple of weeks. We should celebrate this – he’s a genuine star, and has even broken Nigel Mansell’s total of race wins to become the most successful British driver ever (even without the aid of a moustache the sporting regulations should probably have deemed “a moveable aerodynamic device”). But other events in

Entertainment from beyond the grave

On this most spooky of nights, I feel it my duty to warn you that the ghosts of entertainment past are back to haunt us... and they’re after our cash! BOO! Now that I’ve got your attention, there’s something you need to know about long-departed musicians and TV stars... they’re coming back from beyond the grave! WoOOooo! Thirty odd years ago, a typical teenage day for me would have involved quite a lot of rocking out to Queen and Pink Floyd albums, getting on down to a spot of Michael Jackson (if I was feeling funky, obviously) and, after tea, chuckling along to an episode of Dad’s Army. Right now, I can stick the radio on and hear new tunes from Freddie & Co (including one with MJ) and get all melancholy at Pink Floyd being poignant on a track from their new album. Impressive stuff, especially when you take into account how long it is since Freddie Mercury passed away (23 years!), that’s it’s been over five years since Jacko departed, and even the Floyd’s ace keyboardist,

UKIP’s Calypso Collapso

DJ Mike Read once declared Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s song “Relax” obscene. I’m happy to return that favour by stating that I think his “UKIP Calypso” is ear-meltingly hideous. In the 1970s and 80s, DJs were a fun bunch. Cheery, bouncy, larger than life characters, with a permanently sunny demeanour, appalling fashion sense and a non-stop supply of top tunes. Roll forward in time to the present day, and a truly worrying percentage of them have turned out to be utterly appalling individuals, who have wrecked lives. Taking that into account, Mike Read’s “UKIP Calypso”, in which he gets all fan-boy about Nigel Farage, is a fairly mild misdemeanour, unless you consider a cringingly awful satirical song, sung in a fake Caribbean accent, devoid of any amusement, and featuring a repetitive delivery that may induce vomiting, to be a crime. In which case he may be spending the next couple of centuries at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Following Twitter complaints that the song (credited

Young people vs Social Media – who wins?

89% of 15 to 18-year-olds are on Facebook. Really? That sounds low. What are the other 11% doing? When I was but a callow yoof, in a strange time that fashion bypassed called the 80s, I was busy doing “social”. This often involved pretending I was already 18 in local pubs in order to get cider with my mates, sitting around at their houses listening to the latest groovy tuneage on cassettes recorded off the radio, or generally hanging around somewhere annoying grown-ups by the simple (but jolly effective) act of existing and looking vaguely surly at the same time. Happy days indeed. Absent from all this was even the slightest idea of an “Inter Net”, only the vaguest of concepts that computers were useful for anything other than playing primitive games, or that being in touch with your mates 24/7 via teensy screen was one day going to be the biggest thing since Debbie Harry wore a very short dress on Top Of The Pops. The BBC’s “Newsbeat” (which I believe is a news service aime

Unwelcome lighting up time resumes

Autumn: The season of mists, mellow fruitfulness, and idiots using their car’s lights inappropriately again. Pretty much as soon as the cold weather descended, and the evenings started to draw in alarmingly fast, we had the delight that is drivers on our roads with a selfish streak, or possibly just a complete lack of brains. On a splendid run along the A591 on Monday (you remember Monday – it was the one with all the wind and rain) before daylight had bothered to show up, I found myself squinting blearily at the dazzling lights ahead of me. Had I taken a wrong turning in my pre-cappuccino befuddlement, and arrived on the front at Blackpool at lighting up time? Had the sun gone into supernova, leaving me with just minutes before the end of the universe (and ready access to a cappuccino)? Can I please just have a cappuccino? No. Despite the fact that the sky was depositing an inch of rain in the space of a couple of hours (so that’s where it all went!), the person in front

Welcome to Costa del Barrow

Feel that sudden chill in the air? It’s winter, heading this way. Or you’ve left the fridge door open. One of those, definitely. According to people with the word ‘meteorologist’ somewhere in their job title, it has been the driest September since records began. Hardly surprising, really – the wettest winter on record immediately beforehand almost certainly used up all the available rain in the sky early (Note to self: check the sciencey stuff, it doesn’t sound quite right). With just 20% of the normal rainfall of the most Septembery of months, 2014 trounced the previous record holder, good old 1959. Whilst this may have led to less plump courgettes, and parched blue tits mugging you for your bottle of mineral water, it does have a beneficial side-effect: Your granddad will finally have to stop saying “Dry? You don’t know what dry is! When I were but a lad...” Clearly disappointing for grandpops, especially so soon after the “Wet winter? Pah! When I were but a lad...” sto

Any diet you want

I am now an expert on dieting, based on extensive research carried out in the office kitchen, whilst trying to make a coffee with two sugars. I say ‘research’ – what I actually mean is ‘listening’. And when I say ‘extensive’, what I really mean is ‘I heard some colleagues talking about dieting on a couple of occasions’. Having said that, I suppose that is quite rigorous, when compared to the level of analysis done by some people before giving up any food that starts with the letter ‘B’, or surviving for a fortnight purely on grapefruit skins, because that’s what their favourite celebrity supposedly did to “lose 3 stone and look a million dollars!” Office kitchens are a fabulous source of information. You only have to loiter in the doorway for a couple of minutes to pick up all the facts you need about who is leaving, why something won’t work, what your colleagues did at the weekend and (this is the relevant bit, by the way) their latest way of losing some weight, before their b

New vacuum regs really suck/All in a spin

Two fantastically daft technology stories for the price of one! It’s been a great couple of weeks for white goods madness. I’m not even including Apple having to release a ‘fix’ to allow iPhone6 users to uninstall their free copy of U2’s new album. If this has happened to you, try and remember that you deleted the files, or you might wind up searching for them, only to find yourself saying “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”. Panic buying gripped consumers recently, as they rushed to their nearest vacuum cleaner-retailing emporium (or it’s virtual equivalent) to buy devices that really suck, before its too late. Every man-in-the-pub’s favourite baddies, the EU, have decreed that our lovely, British, vacuums (probably made in Korea) can only suck to the tune of 1600 watts, meaning new ones have the potential to be as effective as the wheezy kid at school in the 100 yard dash on sports day. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Brussels Bureaucrats will only allow us 900 p

Time to get haughty-cultural

If you own an allotment, eventually you will succumb to the terrible emotional blight that is Vegetable Envy. Hello. My name is Peter, and it’s been a week since I looked at another man’s courgette and felt ashamed, yet strangely exhilarated. I tried to check myself into the ATC (Alan Titchmarsh Clinic), but autumn is a very busy time for them, and they were fully booked. If you happen to be a sufferer of this debilitating problem (usually brought on by your neighbour’s beautiful plump brassicas, or perfectly shapely peas), then going to your local horticultural show is definitely a bad decision. So, there we were, in the quaint village hall (portrait of the Queen on the wall, vintage upright piano covered up in the corner) marvelling at how anyone managed to make a onion grow quite so large without the use of steroids, or by staying up all night softly calling it “big boy” whilst gently stroking it’s silvery surface. There’s only so much a proud man can take. When I found

Farewell to the sorcerer’s apprentice

There are saints who wouldn’t have the patience to put up with me for more than half an hour, but an amazing apprentice has just survived a whole year. I’ve never had the word ‘Manager’ in my job title, and for a very good reason – I’m the kind of anally-retentive, OCD-ish, sociopath that tends to alarm people at a distance so great, you can only just make out my threatening scowl using binoculars. And that’s before the true extent of my shirt collection becomes apparent. Imagine my surprise when I suddenly found myself with ‘staff’ just before Christmas last year, after the departure of my own manager. True, I had been doing a large amount of the training involved in having an apprentice, but I’ve spent the vast majority of my adult life letting someone else tell me what needs to be done, attend meetings, talk politely to others about priorities, deal with the paperwork and smile at me tolerantly whilst I point out what’s wrong with everything and why it’s all not fair. And ti

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d

Thanks for your email – I’ve deleted it

When I returned from holiday to work recently, I had 180 emails. I was chuffed, as I was expecting a lot more. In the past, over 300 hasn’t been uncommon for a week away from the office. I’m assuming that, should I ever go away for more than two weeks, hitting four figures is entirely possible. I’ll then need another holiday to recover once I’ve cleared them. A sense of creeping dread always accompanies the last couple of days of precious freedom, with the knowledge of the impending email marathon looming large on the horizon. The fact that everyone you see during your first morning back asks how your break was, and allows you enough time to say “It rained quite a lot, and I caught Ebola...” before jumping in and asking what you’re doing about their email, doesn’t help. Apparently, replying with “I reckon I’ll hit Tuesday before lunch, so if you sent it after that come back tomorrow.” is considered unhelpful, whilst saying “Email? I can’t even remember who you are.” is ‘u

50,000 people can't be wrong..?

Amazing. Just checked the statometer (that's a technical term - get over it) and apparently this blog has now cleared 50,000 page views. I can hardly comprehend that fact - the closest thing I can think of is probably How many £s Lewis Hamilton earns in about half an hour. Way back in December 2009, when I blundered into the world of having an online presence, I had no idea that in under 5 years I'd have cluttered up the internet with 550 blog posts, joined twitter and bothered innocent people 19,000 times, and bagged myself a newspaper column. My 'job' (it's a place I go on quite a lot of weekdays and drink coffee) also involves me managing websites, twitter accounts, facebook pages, Flickr, Youtubes and a host of other things that, should the power ever go off and we descend into chaos, will be utterly useless in the battle for survival over the last tube of Pringles. Even if they are just the ready salted ones. As is the way with the web, we all consume

Speaking statistically

Well, that’s my holiday over. A whole six days off work and a staycation in my own house (the breakfasts were very nice). Let’s check the statistics... Unfortunately, the budget wouldn’t stretch to the kind of flashy 3D graphics you see Jeremy Vine swanning about amongst during elections. If it helps to visualize any of this, imagine me waving my arms around furiously in front of a pie chart, before handing back to Huw Edwards. Here, then, in the kind of detail normally reserved for any TV science programme featuring Brian Cox, is my holiday in numbers: 2: The number of friends who stayed with us, before we abandoned them at Oxenholme station during a cloudburst even Noah would describe as “biblical”. 2: Visits to the allotment, where the coin I dug up turned out not to be Roman, but a 2p from 1977. 276: The number of bites received from unidentified stealthy insects at the allotment, whilst waving a fork around and pretending to know what I was doing. 5: The numbe