Shark attack

A Newsnight story about illegal loan sharks has made me think. Usually, news stories about the recession tie in with whatever I’ve been hearing a lot about at work: redundancies, repossessions and repayment problems, mostly.
But while almost every CLA caller is in more debt than they’d like, and a lot are dealing with high-interest doorstep lenders [...]

Tuesday = telly

There’s an interesting contrast on TV at the moment in terms of guilting-the-public-into-feeding-their-kids-better adverts.
The Department of Health/NHS Choices’ friendly, cuddly, no-long-words Change4Life advert launched just after New Year – I’m a big fan of its non-specific exhortation to ‘Move More’, and have been moving my muffin-making spoon much more since it came on.
No, I mock [...]

Today’s unwittingly topical joke as brought to you by E4

“Why have we never noticed before how similar ‘Rekjavik’ sounds to ‘wreak havoc’?” – Samantha’s mother, Samantha Who

Drunk in charge of a laptop?

Unless the Gmail blog is winding me up – and if you can’t trust the Gmail blog, who can you trust? - they’ve come up with a way to help people stop sending inadvisable emails when drunk. Sheer genius. Now we just need someone to invent something similar for Facebook, and a breathalyser for mobile ‘phones to prevent [...]

Fletcher-Hackwood & Friends at Conference, Day #2

We all woke up bright and early on a beautiful day to be left-wing. The sun was shining, the coffee was amaretto-flavoured, and JK Rowling had donated a million pounds to the Labour Party.
At Manchester Central it turned out I was being seconded to steward the press room instead of doing disability support. The press [...]

Fletcher-Hackwood and Friends at Conference, Day 1

NB: retrospectively posted to try and make things less confusing. Yeah, I know I said I’d blog every day, but I’ve been sleepy in the evenings.
So, today was the beginning of Conference! …well, actually it wasn’t, but it was the first day I’d taken off work for conference-related reasons, the first day I got to [...]