The Time Bubble

So, it seems that we can now only drink 14 units of alcohol a week. Otherwise we increase the risk of this that or the other. It was all over the papers this morning. This is hot on the heels of stories about processed meats and countless others that churn never-endingly out of the media, determined to spoil any ounce of enjoyment we might like to try and squeeze out of our short time on this planet. Two things come to mind. Firstly, why is it that all the things that make life enjoyable are so universally condemned. Sugar - terrible, causes diabetes etc. Salt = high blood pressure and heart attacks. Alcohol - cancer, heart disease etc. Basically any food that tastes nice is going to shorten your life, allegedly. Yet all the horrible stuff i.e. salad, various other boring veg, cottage cheese, those horrible rice cake things that remind me of polystyrene, and anything else that is flavourless, bland and boring, that's what they'd have us eat. Smoking, I won't comment on ...

Because of the relocation of the school, we have a longer Christmas holiday than usual with several extra days tagged on to the beginning and the end. Fortunately the weather has been kind so with the mercury nudging up towards the mid teens in recent days we've not had to be confined in the house as can happen in the winter months. Just as well really as there's over a week until Christmas still and I do like to get out and about when the weather allows - just as we did in October when we made it on to the beach at Skegness. Today Claire was working and I didn't want to be cooped up at home all day so we decided to go to Towcester for a day out, one of the places we've been considering moving to if we don't make it up to Louth or can't get a decent place near the new school. We got there late morning and went for a walk up the Bury Mount which is the remains of an ancient castle, now just effectively a big green hill. You can wind your way round this read...

Yesterday, Claire & I walked up to the new Kingsmere estate to see the brand new school. It has been built to accommodate children from the new estate and to replace the 150 year old St Edburg's site, the oldest school in Bicester. A random picture of some houses on Kingsmere (I couldn't find a picture of the new school). As long term readers will recall, I was an opponent of the original plans to do this. Not only from the selfish point of view that the old school was practically on our doorstep and the new one is half an hour's walk away, but from a traditionalist point of view too. The thought of the lovely old building , which so many generations of Bicester children had passed through being sold off to become offices or something filled me with sadness. We've known this was coming for a long time and it's been a major influence on our long term plan to move home, but here we are, still here deliberating about where we are going to live and the new...

Friends and family were last night rallying around a distressed Londoner whose dream day out to an upmarket shopping village turned into a nightmare. Hilary Cholmondley-Smythe, 33, an investment banker from Kensington, West London, explained how a mix up over parking led to the horror of finding herself not in the swanky designer outlet, but instead in the centre of the adjoining town. "I had a few grand left over from my quarterly bonus so I decided to treat myself to a trip to Bicester Village. I wanted to see if I could pick myself up a nice dress for a dinner party some friends of mine are throwing in Belgravia next weekend. So I drove up the M40 in my Mercedes-AMG to see what I could find. Everything was fine until I got off the M40, then I started seeing signs saying the car parks were full and directing me to a park-and-ride system. Obviously, a person of my social class could not possibly be seen dead on a bus, so I ignored those and carried on driving. The traffic w...

I've been curious about Louth for some time, and found myself strangely drawn towards it ever since I found it whilst I was idly looking through the road atlas looking for new places to explore. This was some months ago. I started with Wikipedia, where else, then moved on further to find out as much as I possibly could about this town. Here's a few snippets from Wikipedia that caught my eye: "Louth has a total resident population of 15,930. [2] " "The  Greenwich Meridian  passes through the town and is marked on  Eastgate  with a plaque on the north side of the street, just east of the junction with  Northgate ." "Louth is noted for the wide selection of independent retailers, with around 70% of businesses independently owned. [28]  In 2012, it was named 'Britain's Favourite market town' by the  BBC 's  Countryfile . [29] " " Louth is also known for its specialist grocers, [31]  and local butchers, Meridian Meats, h...

This is going to be a two part blog as there's a lot to tell you! We've just come back from a four night holiday in Saltfleet on the Lincolnshire coast. Now it might not sound like the first choice of holiday, four nights in a caravan at the wrong end of October on the windswept east coast, but we had a fantastic time. We packed an amazing amount into the time we had available. I have a theory that you get more out of a short break than a longer one. When you know you've only got three full days, it focuses the mind. There's no time to waste lounging about or taking a day or two to settle in. You've got to be full on from the start. And you've also only got to make your money last four days, so you don't have to eke it out so much as you do on a longer break. There was an ulterior motive to taking this break. As I've mentioned previously, we have for some time been scouring the country looking for somewhere potentially to relocate to. Why? Well t...

Here's a thing. Back in the dim and distant reaches of the last century, when I was still an impressionable young lad, I wrote a few fan mail letters, mainly to pop stars of the time. This was not unusual activity at the time, and probably no different to the tweeters of today who tweet to their superstar icons in the usually forlorn hope of getting a re-tweet or maybe even a reply. It's not that likely because such superstars tend to have several million followers and in many cases don't even see the accounts - they are "managed". Presumably this is either because they are too busy or more likely because their carefully controlled public personae can't be allowed to tweet themselves in case they say the wrong thing and get caught up in a media storm. Such is the way of the modern world. Back in my day...(wow, I sound so old), we wrote our fan mail on good old fashioned pen and paper. Most used to write to ask for a signed photo and such like but I used to...