The blog
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Hot stuff, baby
It's 3.30am – pushing 4am – and my sleep patterns are screwed backwards and sideways by the shifts. No work this evening, but my body doesn't realise that. I'm wide awake. Also, it's pretty damn hot. They say ladies glow, gentlemen perspire and horses sweat. There's only one thing I can say to that: Neigh.…
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Abuse of trust
Back on March 5th, in a post titled 'H-h-h-holy Joe!', I wrote about how my old deputy headteacher had been hauled up before the court for abusing young boys. To save you searching back for the post, here's a snippet: Holy Joe always made us uneasy. He had a way of standing too close to…
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Going to the Dogs
Making the best of a bad lot, I took the camera with me this evening when I went to work. The Isle of Dogs is a fascinating place, although one I don't savour lingering in alone. It's such a strange mix – high-tech, high finance, high rise offices next to the cold, dead remains of…
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Castles in the sky
Here's a thing to try at home: Go outside and find an old tennis ball, or a stick, or a rock, or indeed just about anything. Throw it up in the air – straight up, vertically, as far as you possibly can. At its highest point it will hang for a moment, as if suspended,…
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In the deep dark of the night…
The snores were sonorous, rounded, baritone-going-on-bass, vibrating with a deep and resonant tone as if the snorer had practiced for years and perhaps earned a certificate of excellence in night-time noisemaking. They were snores that could not be defeated by the pane of glass between me and them, nor by the loud television in the…
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In praise of volunteers (but not of sponsors)
It's been a bitty, but perfectly reasonable, few days. Nothing of wild and stunning excitement has happened (hence the lack of posts) but, equally, nothing too unpleasant has happened either. Just life really, I suppose. I posted a few weeks ago after the British Grand Prix about how my favourite Formula One team, Minardi, had…
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All sparkly clean, but –
I have cactus spines in my arm and shards of blue glass in my feet, my knees are bruised, my backside is damp, my clothes are filthy, and there's a broken flowerpot and a dead olive plant in the bin. And all because I decided to clean the windows. We spotted some kind of easy-use…
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A weird moment, a whinge, and a recommendation
I'm trying to settle down now to a routine of working Saturday to Tuesday, it's an odd set of days and takes some adjusting to. I'll be leaving shortly for tonight's shift. Yesterday's drive saw the oddest incident of near road-rage I've ever been involved in. Not that I make a habit of it, you…
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All dressed up with no place to go
Ha. The cricket's overrun so BBLB has been rescheduled and has lost its phone-in today. Just got a call from them standing me down. Can't say I'm wholly surprised – I learned when I was working in broadcast PR that you can't take anything for granted with TV until it's actually happened.