Property phrasebook

• "Deceptively spacious": pokey and insubstantial


• "A wealth of period features": pokey and shabby; may have glued-on exposed beams, purchased from B&Q


• "Needs some updating": the whole place is a wreck and may even smell


• "Internal viewing highly recommended": it's not quite the dump it appears from the outside


• "Sought-after location": by the police


• "Cozy": vanishingly small


• "Manageable garden": a minute patch of grass with a couple of hanging baskets

Things you don't see anymore...

1. Schoolboys with short trousers


2. Mostly thin people in the street


3. Rag-and-bone men


4. White dog shit


5. Huge mobile phones


6. Separate compartments on trains


7. "Ladies Only" compartments on trains


8. Guards on London tube trains


9. Coppers doing "point duty" with those white, pull-on sleeves


10. The Radio Times only listing BBC programmes


11. People looking at what's around them instead of at their mobiles


12. Toddlers walking rather than being chauffered around in those awful buggies


13. "City gents" with bowlers and tightly-furled umbrellas (always black)


14. String bags (why not?)


15. Those old metal dustbins which were always emptied once a week - and worked!

Frustration

Now several days since I have been able to access the internet on my laptop. Finally went through the challenge of phoning Orange yesterday. Call took 50 minutes or so. Very helpful and patient as I scrambled around on the floor looking at the Livebox etc.

Diagnosis? Everything seems to be working fine, so must be the browser (IE8). Now I have to somehow find/get another copy.

Now several days later. Internet still doesn't work, so this (among other things) has forced the belated decision to finally buy a new laptop. This, at least, is a relief, though I am still to be convinced that the laptop is the source of the internet problem.

Good behaviour!

It's just past 5:30 in the morning in the leafy suburb of Highfield, Southampton. I have just witnessed an extraordinary sight. Outside the hotel is a temporary traffic light. A cyclist stopped at the light, dismounted and walked the bike past the roadworks on the pavement! Bear in mind that there was no one about to see this good behaviour. Yet the cyclist did the right thing.

Bit of a contrast to the bastard cyclist who ran into me in Exhibition Road in London last week, going the wrong way in a one-way section.

Where is the evidence?

Been thinking a lot lately about the relative importance of evidence and reason. "Evidence-based" is a frequent and much-valued adjectival phrase. It's easy to see, however, that because some hypothesis is evidence-based, this does not make it valid.

Without the application of logic and reason, both the methodology and the interpretation may be deeply flawed, leading to a fallacious hypothesis.

Computer says "yes"

I've heard of computers doing this sort of thing before. Here's the proof. Obviously confused by the surname 'Baron'.

One's upmanship

Not to be outdone by the arriviste Middletons (recently media-whipped for "exploiting" the wedding on their Party Pieces webshop), one has decided to offer the plebs one's own selection of tasteless tat.

http://www.highgroveshop.com/gifts-stationery/gifts--stationery/royal-wedding/