grumpyf1

Nice cheery song about... war... Today’s the day! The Christmas number 1 is announced! Will it be Ed Sheeran? The answer to that is – almost certainly, yes. Apart from his own single, he’s up against veteran purveyor of rap, Eminem. Who just happens to be joined on his song by... Ed Sheeran. True, there are a couple of possible late disruptors, but it looks like we’ll be having a ginger Christmas, and neither of the songs vying for the top spot are even of a Christmassy nature. If you’re counting Christmas No.1’s as having to actually mention Christmas, then Ed, and Ed and Em, are not alone in being discounted – Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2”, whilst brilliant, is also one of the most miserable songs to try and have a jolly time too over the festive season. And it was 1979 too. Double depressing whammy. Sing along, Grandma! “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control...” The biggest worldwide seller is Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”, wh...

Let the Saturday morning good times roll! December 2016, and January of this year, were bleak times for those of a certain age, with the passing of TV, film and music stars that meant an awful lot to an awful lot of people. I’m hoping that 2017 isn’t about to follow a similar pattern. The brilliant musician Chris Rea had a near miss, collapsing on stage recently – fingers crossed for him that he’ll still be Driving Home For Christmas... or at least getting a lift. This was followed, all too quickly, by the news that TV presenter Keith Chegwin had died, at the age of 60. “Cheggers” was the ever-exuberant member of the line-up that presented Multi-Coloured Swap Shop on BBC1 on a Saturday morning. In the late 70s and early 80s, there wasn’t exactly an overload of TV for kids, so the arrival of the lengthy extravaganza of music, entertainment, interviews and fun was essential viewing for scruffy oiks like myself, even if it did mean having to get up and make sure I’d had breakfas...

Fancy an investment? A toilet-related problem at work has given me a brilliant idea for an app... The current lack of conveniences available for use in our offices is, well – inconvenient. Due to some underground pump-relating thingies failing (I’m very technically-minded, as you can see) we currently have to walk to different buildings several minutes away to spend pennies. Or other amounts of coinage. We have options, which means I’ve visited a fair few lavatories I’ve never been to before. Some were good, some were bad. Some had very good things, but were let down in other ways. Sharing my in-depth report on my visits with strangely underwhelmed colleagues, I realised there was a money-making opportunity here – a loo rating app for you phone. Why go through the misery of not knowing if a toilet is going to be nice, when you can open your phone and let the app show you ratings for your nearest available bogs? I had come up with a name, based on the popular “TripAdvisor”, but ...

Nope. No idea. Is that Ed Sheeran? So, you’ve successfully set up home beneath a rock. Congratulations. You therefore haven’t heard anything at all about the forthcoming royal wedding. For the rest of us, it’s been a pretty relentless week of news about Harry getting hitched. Mis-hearing it, I initially thought the 5th in line to the throne was preparing to marry Angela Merkel, which was somewhat surprising, as she’s already married (for starters). But no, the bearded Prince is preparing to say “I jolly well do” to American actress, Meghan Markle. Just to put the icing on the wedding-cake of news overload that ensued following the announcement, the BBC website even has a running stream of updates featuring both actual news and fascinating insights and opinions on the hottest topic of the week. In hindsight, I should have used some inverted commas around two of those items: ‘News’ is somewhat pushing it, when it’s basically the same bits of information endlessly re-played in s...