As my dr rdrs may have noticed, I have not been best pleased with the change of ownership and new management philosophy at the gym where I have been going for A Very Long Time now - I started going there quite shortly after partner and I moved in together (were we married, we would be past pearl, but not quite to coral).
Quite apart from my general ( Read more... )

Train station toilets take millions every year: The true cost of spending a penny at a train station has been discovered - and some station toilets take many hundreds of thousands of pounds every year, according to data released by Network Rail.

London Victoria made the most money, raking in £2.3m from passengers over the past three financial years ( Read more... )

Made it to the Hepworth exhibition at Tate Britain, yay.
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Spotted on the Tube (Victoria Line): ad for (remunerated) test subjects from this company, which is the sort of thing that makes me thing, woah, scenario for near-future biomedical thriller, what?
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Interview with Sara Paretsky
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Is there a connection between Ford’s The Good Soldier ( Read more... )

Honestly, where do I begin with the museum that was pitched as being about the suffrage movement and women's history in the East End, and turns out, just before opening, to be about Jack the Ripper? I think I will just direct you to
( Read more... )

I will concede that it is probably never a good idea to click on the links in those spam emails that Abebooks send one, and that one can't automatically ditch in the Junk folder because one does sometimes buy books from them.
50 Classic Books & Why You Should Read Them
All of 4 of them by women, and 3 of those are beloved children's classics (but ( Read more... )

Poster in underground spotted, promoting a new novel The Scandalous Duchess*.

Why am I AAAAARRRRGH about this?

Because Anya Seton's Katherine was a major thing in my teenage years and my Canonical Version of the story. (And appears to be still in print, available on Kindle, etc, so not A Forgotten Classic.)

Reading the blurb at Amazon does not ( Read more... )

I'm a bit surprised not to have seen anything around these parts about the big Jane Austen fight that's been all over the papers here: it was reported a couple of weeks ago in The Guardian, and I was reminded of it when I came across it in the columns of a recent issue of the THE: Times Higher Education, having migrated from the columns of the ( Read more... )

Vikings ripped off by fake swords:
Some Viking swords were among the best ever made, still fearsome weapons after a millennium. The legendary swords found at Viking sites across northern Europe bear the maker's name, Ulfberht, in raised letters at the hilt end. Puzzlingly, so do the worst ones, found in fragments on battle sites or in graves ( Read more... )

Doris Lessing, aged 88.... [i]n her [Nobel] acceptance speech... recalls her childhood in Africa and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge, while those in more privileged countries shun reading for the 'inanities' of the internet. You know, I would find this a lot more compelling if one could not, looking back over the ( Read more... )

What is this thing with 'we don't give refunds/we will charge you enormous admin fee if we do'? Quite apart from my recent experiences with trying to exchange or return theatre & concert tickets, I've just been on the phone to First Great Western about getting a refund for the tickets to Exeter that I didn't use last week, and they charge a ( Read more... )