Drew has gone off with his dad for a week's bike frame building holiday up north, near Melton Mowbray. He has to learn a technique called 'braising' and wear a pair of overalls that look like this:


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I found out yesterday that I passed my beekeeping exam, woo. I'm planning to go on and do some advanced beekeeping written exam modules, but may wait till I've completed my CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals) Chartership portfolio, which I've barely done anything on. Librarians who charter can put 'MCILIP' after their ( Read more... )

Went to see Chris DJing Offbeat-style down South at the 'How does it feel to be loved?' night in Brixton yesterday ( Read more... )

Thanks to everyone who wished me good luck with my beekeeping exam. It didn't go too badly, not perfect but I answered most of the questions and the bees didn't go mental and sting me ( Read more... )

Back from a week's holiday in Scotland. It was so strange walking outside and seeing fields and trees and no people for miles. We did a lot of walking, a lot of seeing cows and a lot of eating tasty Scottish food. We got up at 8.45am each day (early to catch the hotel breakfast, but bliss compared to our usual 6am), had a shower and padded down the ( Read more... )

I haven't been posting much lately because it has got crazy-busy at work, we launched a new website and I have been working all day in a zen focused panic induced trance as a result, before collapsing at night ( Read more... )

Today I have learned about ants, the most fascinating of the social insects. If ants were as cuddly and good at making tasty food as honeybees, and less fond of formic acid, I would switch to keeping them in a heartbeat.

How's this description of the parasitic ant Polyergus for ingenuity...

'In most cases the Polyergus queen quickly detects the ( Read more... )

Went beekeeping today. The bee inspector came to the apiary three weeks ago; she split our hive into two as it had queen cells. Last week I frantically made frames to fill up the hives, not my favourite task as it involves lots of noisy hammering, usually of my fingers ( Read more... )

On Tuesday I took Drew to see Charlie Brooker film You have Been Watching at the BBC television centre in White City. We must have been quite far ahead in the queue, as 20 and 21 was written on our wrist bands and we ended up only two rows back from the front ( Read more... )

I went to see Victoria Coren record her radio show Heresy. It was great as I had free tickets through http://www.tvrecordings.com, and also the show is recorded about 20 minutes walk away from my work. When Drew and I got through the door we were asked to complete a short 3-question ( Read more... )