Heston Bloomin’eck is to put a new dish on the menu.
Nothing special there I hear you say, perhaps not. The aim of the creator of this burger is that it appears NO different to any other burger you might purchase.
If he gets it right the only difference will be when l’addition drops onto the table with a thud. £207,000 quid please.
This post was initiated as a result of a recent one by Araminta commenting on the use (or misuse) by Tesco of a “back to work” program in Britain. It reflects only one person’s experience of the system employed here and I make no claim that such system is more effective than those used elsewhere, however it is different.
The Pogey, the Dole, or as my old dad used to say the Parish. “If you don’t watch out son you’ll be on the Parish” that’s how old he was, and back then that’s who supported you, if anyone did, the charity of the parish.
I was on the parish once, in the US, it was 1998, I was 54 and it was the middle of winter. The company I had been working for since 1984 declared bankruptcy, just like that, in February. The whole operation, about two hundred people, was closed down and a trustee brought in to liquidate the assets. There was no severance pay or golden, silver, tin or lead handshakes, no pensions or settlements just pay-to-date and goodbye. Continue reading “The Pogey”
A man starts his new job at the zoo and is given three tasks. Continue reading “Pure corn”
The tragic accident reported in today’s papers of the coach carrying British children and accompanying adults going off the motorway stirred memories of school trips I have been involved in. Every such accident does and can even lead to nightmares.
I remember leading a trip to Paris where we travelled by coach. I suppose we should have realised at the start, when the driver complained mournfully that he wasn’t driving his “own motor”, that there might be problems. The coach he usually drove was off the road for repairs. We arrived safely at our hostel and the driver took the coach off to a safe car park. The following day he drove us into the centre of Paris, we arranged a pick-up point and set off to show the pupils Paris. Each adult was responsible for a small group of pupils, as is normal. It wasn’t the driver’s fault that when we got to the Eiffel Tower, one of my colleagues broke down in tears, begging me not to make her go up the tower. Just what you need – one adult short on the highest monument in Paris! The following day we set off to visit the castle at Rambouillet, because we knew Versailles was closed for repairs. The driver, still reminding us that this was not his “own motor”, insisted he knew the route I wanted him to take. When we passed the exit for Rambouillet and headed off towards Rouen, it took a lot of argument to persuade him we were on the wrong road and must turn round. Continue reading “School trips”
Just to put this into context: I’m much closer to extinction than I was 69 years ago. That’s life. Or in this case, death. So, musing as one does now and then about the transitoriness of this mortal coil, I wonder why the goody goodies of this world persist in lamenting the natural passing of everything they can shake a stick at!
If they could, they’d repopulate our crowded countryside with dinosaurs, woolly mammoths and giant stinging nettles. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about.
And now they even think they can save all of the 7,000 surviving languages – as if there is any lasting value in being able to say hi in Anishinaabemowin or Early Outer Mongolian.
Come on, guys. Spend your tax income on something else. Like educating aborigines. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist it.)
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has recently had a grand make-over, but as the exhibition (New galleries of Ancient Egypt and Nubia) has been open a while, that is since November, I had hoped that there would be fewer visitors today so that I could enjoy it in peace and quiet.
Nah.
It was crowded and there was great deal to see and take in. We borrowed the hand-held sets for an auditory commentary which was a little unsatisfactory being incomplete – and with so many people around it was difficult to be in the right place at the right time! In addition two things I had been keen to see (the ultrasound scan of a mummy which has been taken to show the insides of a mummy which has never been unwrapped and a CT scans of a child mummy) were both out-of-order… so I shall have to go back. However the artist Angela Palmer has used these scans to make a wonderful piece of art which you can read about here.
I took a few pictures, but it is difficult to capture the exhibition. The order and exactitude required to be a museum curator is illustrated here
for the Photo Competition
Politics is always good for a larf. The ink is hardly dry on France’s vituperative propaganda against the UK’s protection of its sovereignty and its ‘City’, when suddenly the excess of sweetness and light is enough to induce chronic nausea. Maybe Bismarck was right: politics really is only the art of the possible. But I wonder if it is also the art of selective amnesia.
A caption or two wouldn’t come amiss either.
A. Did you know that the word “race car” spelled backward still spells “race car”?
Continue reading “Spelling”
Boadicea's Chariot 
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