On the whole, Cornbury had more good than bad. The organisers can't be blamed for persistent rain and unseasonably low temperatures, or the fact that Jeremy Clarkson and David Cameron keep turning up. We saw enough good music (clearly we wouldn't have bought tickets if we'd thought this would be otherwise), there were no massive queues for ( Read more... )

Thoughts, long and short, after attending Cornbury 2008 ( Read more... )

Ah, the joy of organising cricket matches. Two years ago, the groundsman rang me up to tell me the ground had lost its drinks licence a week before my 40th birthday game - no problem. This week? I get a phone call to tell me that the caterers have been involved in a car crash at the weekend and have baled out, five days before the match. In the ( Read more... )

And so Doctor Raj Persaud is brought to book for what he has described as a "cut and paste" error, compounded by his "inability" to "use" quotation marks "correctly ( Read more... )

If my French was better (which I suppose it could be - it's not as if it's frozen at its current level and I couldn't learn a few more of the words I don't already know, such as "monkey-wrench" or "rewritable DVD", if I needed to), I could see myself living there quite happily. In these days of the internet (or le internet, as they say in France ( Read more... )

On a global scale I didn't go away that long (4 days) or travel that far (1800 miles), but I certainly feel as if I have returned from a decent adventure ( Read more... )

I am an inveterate capturer of BBC radio output, so that, having filled up my media player, I can be my own Programme Controller; and while I generally choose to listen to music on the way to and from work, I like to be able to spend my lunch hour immersed in drama and comedy. While I can't escape the work environment physically, I can at least do ( Read more... )

I was sorry to see that Bletchley Park is in trouble. One of the manifold fun things I've been doing in recent real life, and not writing about, was going there for a day out. Last month, after we'd come back from Paris, we had one more day of holiday, and might well have spent it loafing around the house, and doing nothing much in particular, ( Read more... )

Two months to go till the cricket tour / college reunion, so I sent out the important e-mail (the one which points out that saying yes-what-a-good-idea-I'd-love-to-come is no longer enough, and to prove it, here are the details of the bank account I have set up to collect everyone's contributions ( Read more... )

At first I thought this would be about some who'd really objected to Delia's latest series...

Fair play, though. If someone tried to put a layer of tomatoes on my shepherd's pie, I'd be reaching for a shovel.