grumpyf1

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...

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...

Now THIS is rather good! The Beatles and the Knack, mashed expertly together by the genius of Go Home Productions. Lovely... 

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...

Who likes the news? Who likes widdly guitar? Put your hands in the air in a rock-type hand gesture, imagine Huw Edwards in a leather jacket (with even more of the weird little snarly thing he does), and get ready... TO ROCK THE NEWS!

Today I was defeated by a bottle of screen wash. I now realise that packaging is ganging up on me. All I wanted to do was have a clean windscreen. I wasn’t to know that I was going to have to face a Krypton Factor-style test, and wind up wrestling on the floor with 2.5 litres of blue stuff and one of those press and twist lids normally reserved for the evil that is Paracetamol bottles. When my wife finally rescued me from my tearful state, I discovered that there was then one of those foil and plastic discs, stuck onto the opening, as a final two-fingered salute from the screen wash. As usual, scrabbling at its surface wouldn’t un-stick it, and it’s flexible nature meant piercing it was impossible too. Eventually, I had to resort to scissors. I know the intention is to prevent children drinking it by mistake, but honestly – if they’re clever enough to get through that security nightmare without hurling it out of the nearest window, I’m guessing they aren’t the sort of kids t...

Well now - Here's an odd one. A national newspaper recently published an article about alleged failures by a previous incarnation of the Parish Council in my village, which (they claimed) led to bodies being buried in the wrong place in our local cemetery, along with other supposed misdemeanours. You can read the somewhat sensationalised story here , which was provocatively titled " The 'Bermuda Triangle' cemetery where corpses vanished... and bereaved tended the wrong graves". I was also made aware, by way of my links to the Parish Council through my role as Chair of the Allotment Tenants' Association, that several current Councillors had resigned, because of issues around this story and the events linked to it. In my column (for the Northwest Evening Mail edition to be published on the 1st of August), I was critical of the paper that published the article as I felt it had helped to precipitate the resignations of good people, who were keenly workin...