grumpyf1

Well played... Its been a few years since that Scottish guy was heard on YouTube shouting “Oh my God! Trampoline! Trampoline!” as his neighbour’s one sailed dramatically past his window in a gale. Since them we’ve dealt stoically with flooding, we’ve endured snow and ice like the troopers we are, and we’ve generally put on a brave face, gritted our teeth, and just jolly well got on with it as much as possible, regardless of what nature has thrown at us. Until Saturday. Saturday was a game changer. The day that will be remembered for possibly a short while as Quake Day, when unprecedented levels of almost no damage whatsoever rippled forth from deep under somewhere north-north east of Swansea. This shocking once-in-a-decade seismic event clocked in with a social media-inflaming 4.4 magnitude, with the effects felt as far as the southern edge of the Lake District, where it was easily mistaken for several excited lambs landing simultaneously after some particularly exuberant fro...

After a jolly day trip to Edinburgh on Monday, we were heading home on the train when Twitter delivered me some devastating news... Still full of excessive amounts of coffee, pizza, and reeling from the sensory overload of a large lingerie department visit, my journey back to the deep south of Cumbria should have been one of calm, tranquillity, listening to the Doctor Who theme song and surreptitiously studying other passengers then pretending I was enjoying the view when they looked up. Of course, a trip to a large city meant a heady day of unprecedented mobile phone signal strength, making the choice between looking at the delights of beautiful Edinburgh, and discovering that my phone could actually load a video, all the more tricky. As the miles slipped by in a blur of lights and a faint whiff of train toilet, the selection of letters and symbols indicating signal strength gradually lessened, until I was once again faced with the bleak message “Unable to update Twitter at th...