Category: Miscellaneous
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Plus ça Change, Plus c’est la Même Chose
Back in 2024, I noted that the area near where I work, was seeing the final bicycle shops in the area close down. We’d gone from a surfeit of bike shops to basically none at all. The final shop to shut was Evans, now owned by Mike Ashley (Sports Direct et al), which shut its…
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Douglas Adams and Nigel Kneale
Over the weekend I managed to get along to two separate, and largely unconnected events – except that both were based around writers who found prominence in science fiction. And one is much funnier than the other. 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams Unbound has just published this new book beautifully edited by…
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Danger UXB
My phone rang. It was dad. “Hi Dad, what’s up?” I had actually spoken to him about 45 minutes earlier so it was unusual that he was calling back. “Mum thinks she’s found an unexploded bomb in the garden.” “What!” “She’s on the phone now to the police…” Mum is a keen gardener, and she’d…
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Making the Most of Life Under Lockdown
Well it’s been just over two weeks for me now living in a lockdown state of mind. It might not officially have been that long, but for me it became apparent when I listened to one of the first press conferences and the imperative that in London in particular all non-essential travel had to stop,…