Blog Entries

Picture the scene:
You’re being chased by vampires. Buffy is on holiday in Majorca, you’re out of holy water & the church door is locked & Van Helsing is ratted on too many glasses of Kwak.
So thank your lucky stars that Heron of Alexandria had invented a vending machine that dispensed the holy water you so need to dispatch the be-fanged fiends, rendering them smouldering heaps of ash on the pavement. Job well done!

From holy water to wine vending, these (usually)...

“There was I, diggin’ this ‘ole. ‘ole in the ground. Sort of big & sort of round…”, Sang ex-Carry On star, Bernard Cribbins in his 1962, top 10 smash hit, Hole In The Ground. My dad had the record & I loved it.

But what “the voice of the Wombles” failed to mention for the duration of that ditty is the half a dozen blokes in day-glow orange vests all “supervising” said digging whilst chain smoking roll-your-own fags & ogling any life form with more than one X chromosome...

Last week I was fortunate enough to go to Romania to see the best band ever & one thing I never considered before lent itself to blogging about. The humble taxi cab.

I've taken taxis in many countries & the similarities are extraordinary (to a point).
The drivers are not too dissimilar to hairdressers really. They see hundreds of punters on a daily/ nightly basis & have the same conversation with every last one of them. Another case of “doll-with-string-in-the back”....

So the second test at Edgebaston starts without so much as a hint of bad light or rain.
But the second day is blighted by rain showers. Typical!
As my father calls it, Cricket is a traditional English rain making ceremony.
& people wherever I go in the world, make a point of mentioning the English weather & just how wet it is. People that in 99% of cases have never actually been to England, let alone outside of their own borders.

As a side note, this is...

Sitting in the back row of the movies on a Saturday night, sang doo wop/ R&B combo The Drifters way back when I wasn't even a glint in anyone's eye. The song prevailed & was trolled out on local radio what felt like every 15 minutes, but the strange thing was that none of my “school era” girlfriends had ever heard it & so I changed radio stations, so as not to feel so bad.


Going to the flicks was a big thing when I was a kid. There was an Odeon in my home town of...