Category: General

Accident in the Afternoon

“EEEVVVEEE-ning Chronicle!”

The newspaper vendors tried their best to be heard over the multitude of buskers, great and small, that carnivalised the pedestrian precinct. To help sell their wares at their mobile kiosks the street traders had special extras to entice Mr and Mrs Public into buying their news. Free Mars Bar with today‘s paper, screamed the headline emblazoned over the front of their wheeled booth. As offers you can’t refuse go this one was a fence-splitting four faulter: small size of bar, the chocolate will melt in the afternoon heat, probably out of date and it is not fried. The declining newspaper industry will have to try better than that. Who wants to pay for inky fingers when you can strain your eyes online for free? Continue reading “Accident in the Afternoon”

Reporting in…

Good evening all.  After my long absence, I think I have reached the stage where I am reasonably fit to be seen again in polite ( mostly…) company.  Where have I been?  Well, I’ve been right here in the salubrious suburb of East Acton all along.  I’ve been AWOL so long that I can’t remember where I was with my son’s illness when I slipped away and closed the door quietly behind me…

I’m sure I shared with you the fact that my son was suffering clinical depression? ( The good news is that he is well on the way to recovery. )  It was the fact that I’ve spent the last three years (good grief, it really is that long ,)supporting the lad through the worst of it that made me disappear from the radar.  I really wasn’t good online company as I found myself on an increasingly shorter fuse and every time I put pen to paper it turned into more than a bit of a rant.  I really didn’t want to subject my co-charioteers to that, hence the self-imposed exile.  I haven’t been entirely off-line, but confined my excursions to James `Delingpole’s blog in the DT, (and that old duffer Geoffrey Lean,) where I was able to rant at the CAGW Whackos to my heart’s content 🙂
Continue reading “Reporting in…”

Life’s a Beach

On vacation this week, borrowed a house from my rich business partner, on the beach at Lewes (say Lew-is), Delaware. Got here late Friday night via Delaware City, Delaware (more about which later). Raining today and windy with it, holiday innit?
Lewes (the First Town in the First State) was settled by the Dutch in 1631 in what was to become Delaware (the first state to sign the Declaration) so naturally it is home to the Zwaanendael Museum just a couple of blocks away from here, and perhaps a little more surprising home to the Kalmar Nykel, a replica of the Dutch ship that brought original settlers to Wilmington, Delaware (sixty miles North of here), however, they were Swedes, following me so far?
Here she is back in 2011 on the Bay.

Continue reading “Life’s a Beach”

Living with Huns

Roughly two months ago I returned to Trier. Or rather, an underwhelming suburb of Trier 10-15 minutes by train away from the city centre. Originally it was my plan to stay for two weeks before going to Karlsruhe to seek my fortune. Or at least gainful employment which would be a fortune for tax collectors. Trier, despite its aesthetic virtues is economically stagnant. It is possible, of course, to get by without too much difficulty here but it can hardly compete with Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt-am-Main or even the neighbouring mini-powerhouse, Luxembourg much less London or Hong Kong for economic vibrancy and potential for advancement. Continue reading “Living with Huns”

I am delighted . . .

. . . to find that WordPress have finally upgraded their comment preprocessor so that images can be posted in comments by merely including their url – a facility that was always present in posts but sadly missing from comments.

I am equally delighted that a Charioteer has discovered this and used it to good effect, and published the information for the benefit of others.

WordPress are always making changes, some good, some bad – such as the recent loss of numbered comments and the quote facility, and the new post creation page.

I am somewhat less than delighted by the disparaging comments about the help – hundreds of hours of it – provided by Boadicea and me in assisting others to post images and videos and slideshows and writing easily understood guides for the Menu Bar.   We worked hard on a load of technical thingies during the early days of the Chariot and we are saddened by the ignorant dismissiveness that appears to be the contemporary meme.

To quote Old Bill from The Bystander, “Well, if you knows of a better ‘ole, go to it.”

O tempora, o mores.

😦