Christmas leftovers/tidying up after Christmas

This is an intervention - step away from the cheese.

I hope you’ve had a wonderful festive season so far? Just a few days to go until the Doctor Who special. Oh, and the New Year. The days are getting longer, and we’ll soon be done with a year dominated by Brexit. 2019 will be better, right? Right? Please say yes.

I thought I’d finish the year with a romp through my notebook, allowing me to serve up a few choice items that got me thinking over the last 12 months, but didn’t make it into full columns. A kind of Bubble & Squeak of randomness. Mmm...

Has anyone ever wondered what time-travellers would think if they jumped forward 30 years to today? Considering the number of smokers back then, it would be easy to assume that cigarettes had now been replaced by people carrying small bags of dog poo around.

2018 featured an awful lot of meals with pea shoots on them, for no discernible reason. I’ve even had a fry-up with them on. Is there a committee that decides what this year’s pointless garnish is? I’m imagining a meeting going like this:

“OK – Thanks for coming everyone. Our job is to decide what wacky item gets introduced to the culinary world this year. Ideas? Yes, Clare...”

“Pea shoots.”

“Pea... shoots?”

“You know. The end of the stems on pea plants.”

“Are they even edible?”

“Yeah. Probably. Who cares?”

“Fair point. I think we have a winner...”

Remember when a weighty manual came with any tech/gadget you purchased? They were big and encyclopedic in their detail. I got a new phone this year, and the 6x12cm manual was a massive 10 pages long. The text is so small, you need a magnifying glass to read it. Screens get bigger. Manuals get smaller. Coincidence?

I did have one genuine, profound, thought this year. What if we don’t actually need to be thinner, more fashionable, calmer, have better skin etc. to be happy? What if we are, in fact, fine just as we are, and it’s society that’s messed up? Then I had a cappuccino and went back to my day job as International Man Of Misery.

My sincere thanks to Donald Trump and Lewis Hamilton for providing so much inspiration for my wry look at the week this past year, and thanks to you for kindly tolerating me. I hope 2019 is a fantastic year for you.

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 28th of December 2018. The version used on their website ran as "Thanks for inspiration - Donald Trump and Lewis Hamilton". It did have a picture of me at the top, but was listed as by Tom Murphy, Audience and Content Editor. He edits audiences?! Bit harsh.

This one was actually written the day after the preceding column, as I was away for Christmas. Not as many leftovers in my notebook as there used to be, as I don't make that many notes now - I tend to write on the fly. Tricky, because they're very small, and tend to fly off mid-word.

These were the first two columns written on my new laptop. I get very used to a piece of computing kit, so this was quite a wrench. So far, it's Dell-y good.

An interesting year, column-wise. It started with a 500 word "Thank grumpy it's Friday" outing, changed to a full-page, 1000 word "A wry look at the week" gig in two papers, then dropped to 400 words in just the one again.

339 columns/pages to date, over six and a half years. I wonder what 2019 will bring..?

Have a great new year.

(CD A-Z: Still that Chris Rea mammoth box set!)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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