Congratulations to Scotland - but how the hell did that happen?

England won against a much improved French team yesterday, and deserved it - even if their try was wrongly awarded. Chris Ashton still can't tackle though.

But the game that I actually enjoyed watching on Saturday was Leicester v Saracens in the evening. It had tries aplenty, a ( Read more... )

This is fun....

Poster

...and rather compulsive I imagine, if you are a cook. How many of these doodads do you own?

My whites are white again and my house smells like a chemical factory. Well done Dylon Colour Run Remover.

I have been out most of the day at Otmoor RSPB Reserve where I saw a wonderful flock of 200+ golden plovers joining up with a similar number of lapwings to make patterns in the sky. The lapwings flew directly over my head at one point, and ( Read more... )

A stray red sock has turned all my whites pink. (It is a free sleep sock from Virgin Atlantic - so Richard Branson is to blame for the whole thing ( Read more... )

Still in the throes of this cold, and spending more hours asleep than awake. Went to 'Privates on Parade' last night. Simon Russell Beale was a great at being camp as you would expect, and there were no weak links in the cast. The play itself has some good song and dance numbers, and plenty of jokes, but suffered from an inexplicable decision by ( Read more... )

Further to the very sad news about valerie_z her sister talula728 has published the following entry giving details of a memorial award being set up in Valerie's name:

http://talula728.livejournal.com/98916.html

As a tribute, we have set up The Valerie Lewis Memorial Award for Excellence in Creative Writing ( Read more... )

I took the day off today to go on a special guided tour of Stonehenge and some of the associated monuments. It meant getting up at 6am and driving through the dark, dark night to Wiltshire, so we could go inside the stone circle before it opened to the public.

It's smaller than I remembered: ( Read more... )

It's been a grey, overcast and snowy weekend, but I've tried to get out as much as possible anyway. In the first instance I scraped off my car and went to collect a parcel which had arrived from America. Which turned out to be a belated pressie from the lovely rabid1st. She'd taken a couple of my autumn photos and had them turned into note cards, and they ( Read more... )

So, the snow arrived as promised. Left work at 4pm - and then spent 1hr and 5 mins sitting on a train outside Reading station - an exciting new personal record. And it wasn't even to do with the snow - the train lost air pressure and was unable to operate its brakes, which left us clamped to the tracks until an engineer came along to fix it ( Read more... )

Went to see The Master and Margarita last night at the Barbican - 3 and a half hours long and yet it flashed past. In fact it was too frenetic, if anything. There were things that didn't work, and the sum of the parts lacked the emotional punch you might have expected. But so many things were adventurous, bold, theatrical and inventive. Complicite ( Read more... )