grumpyf1

After the week they’ve just had, it seems VW might need to prefix the name of the cute little “Up” car with the words “Royal Screw”, following the shock revelation that they rigged emission tests. Senior Executives of the beleaguered Volkswagen have this week been using phrases like “endlessly sorry” and “totally screwed up” as they desperately attempt to minimise the damage caused by the scandal over the rigging of car emission tests for some of their diesel models in the US. The figures are staggering, with 11 million vehicles worldwide involved, seemingly containing a device in their engines that can detect when a test is being carried out (compared to normal road driving conditions), and change performance to improve the figures. Assumingly this device simply detects if there’s an argument taking place, someone had just spilt a coffee in the footwell, is singing badly along to the high bits of Bohemian Rhapsody, or the repeated phrase “are we there yet?” is audible, and goe...

Studycat says: "Sod this for a game of soldiers!" A productive day off work studying ; enjoying the solitude, researching on the internet, peace and quiet to concentrate.  Well, that’s what I’d imagined it would be like, anyway. It was a good idea – give my new studies a turbo boost by spending a day away from the office. Gentle music, a chance to really get under the skin of the subject and immerse myself in the intricacies and details, uninterrupted. The elderly lady next door isn’t prone to loud bursts of heavy metal head-banging, or DIY shenanigans, and the house the other way up our terrace is empty. It was to be me, several home-made cappuccinos, the computer and my little head being pumped full of big ideas, challenged by concepts and ultimately enriched ahead of an exam later in the year. The universe had other plans for me, though. A double-technological whammy meant I spent a large part of the morning looking at my computer screen with a puzzled expres...

I went to a stately home at the weekend. This just might have been my favourite thing. You're right - it IS entirely unrelated to the rest of this post. This isn't the bleedin' Guardian, y'know. It's a funny old game, this blogging lark. I do wonder sometimes what I'm achieving by doing it, but it turns out I've clearly not thought about it too hard, as I recently passed 600 posts! That's an awful lot of randomness I've subjected you to, so thanks for sticking with me, and please accept my apologies. August was a particularly successful month if the blog views counter is anything to go by, with a figure of nearly 2000 for the month, making it my best month since way back in July 2012. Will I carry on doing it? After 600+ posts, this blog is now more an extended remix of my weekly newspaper column, as opposed to the stream of conciousness flow of random content that first appeared on here when I started out - much of it to do with Formula ...

Pass the salad dressing... Have you arrived home to find your house has been burgled, but all the invaders have taken is salad from the fridge?  I think I know the culprits... Another season of allotmenteering is gently drawing to a close. True, thanks to a very cold spring it hardly feels like it got going, but the half-dozen very small, stubbornly green, tomatoes on the withering plant are evidence that we did have a growing season. Sort of. All that’s left now is to see if eating any of the rather small apples causes our heads to implode, pick the last few alarmed-looking courgettes before the frost gets them, and look forward to trying to get up there to poke a fork in liquid mud before it all freezes completely and it’s only light for an hour just after lunch. After that, winter will come. Still, even if the nicely mulched compost and bucket of chicken poo you could smell from Scotland didn’t provide us with a bumper crop, the years of experience, closely guarded t...

Yum Yum! Rocky Road! Financial reports on the news can be pretty dull.  If you don’t give a FTSE about stock market movements and are uninterested in the interest rates, only one man can help... The BBC’s Economics Editor, Robert Peston, can enliven even the most dreary of financial updates, injecting his own inimitable presentation and personal styles into the subject matter in a way that leaves you smiling, so clear is his enthusiasm for the subject at hand. A recent report on the likelihood of a future interest rate rise could easily have been a by-the-very-low-numbers snooze-fest, but some footage of a conveyor belt of chocolatey produce zipping by and Pesto enthusiastically saying “Yum Yum, Rocky Road!” over the top certainly got my attention (although I now have a semi-permanent hankering for cake). So effective was this introduction, that I’ve now adopted it as my new favourite phrase for describing anything good. Congratulations Rob – my wife thinks I’m now even...