I was in Godwin's Farm tearoom, just off that road, when this passed over. We saw this black churning cloud pass over without a drop of rain hitting the window, then suddenly all hell broke loose as the cloud chucked hailstones backwards at the other side of the building.
The latest Avaaz campaign is one I wouldn't have thought anyone could object to, and after signing it myself I watched the little nonstop trickle of names shove me off the bottom of the list, and noticed proudly that the UK was the most represented country.
"Let's count them" I thought to myself stupidly, knowing that I am sufficiently OCD to get stuck into it and not know when to stop.
By the time I'd reached the bottom of a notebook page I finally knew it was time to stop.
The UK won, narrowly beating France, with Belgium coming in a surprise third place. There were a smattering of Canadas, a few Australias, but the big surprise was the USA. Four.
People who travel by Ryanair are, almost by definition, looking to get the best deal they can. Very few spendthrifts travel Ryanair. The company's cut-prices are legendary. Unfortunately so are the little tricks it comes up with to squeeze a little more out of its customers.
If you're travelling with this company, you probably won't, for example, be buying flight insurance, and if you are you're probably going to go somewhere that will insure you at cheapo-cheapo rates and thus, when you get to the bit about flight insurance, you will want to click 'Don't cover me'.
If you can find it.
On the web page it says to click 'Don't cover me' in the drop down box at the bottom of the page.
Go on. Find it.
Can't, can you?
Well just for you, as a once only offer, I'm going to tell you the secret.
You know how you can't progress on through with your booking until you give your location? Well look on down the list until you find the letter 'L' and there you'll find 'Don't cover me'. Give your location as 'Don't cover me' and you'll save yourself just over eleven quid per person.
I picked this tip up from 'Which?' magazine.
The April issue.
You know, it speaks volumes for what a bunch of twisters Ryanair must be that I have only just realised that this was an April Fools joke...
I was somewhat surprised by the number of people who asked "Who's Bert Weedon?" when his death was announced. I thought everyone knew. I guess it was a particular time and a particular place.
Bert Weedon was already a session musician when I was born, with the arrival of rock'n'roll he started appearing all over the place, there just weren't many rock'n'roll guitarists in Britain. He had a few hits with other people's songs, but he also recorded the original version of 'Apache' only to see The Shadows getting the hit in the UK and... some other guy getting it in the USA.
But what he should be remembered for was an instruction book. I was the only guitarist I knew that didn't learn via Bert's 'Play in a day' book (With one exception who was a kid whose parents promptly sent him to a tutor...). Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, and Brian May all learned to play in a day, heck, even Eric Clapton learned to play that way, and how does the idea of a world without The Beatles and all the people they influenced grab you?
'Play in a day' is still in print, and it's now the best selling guitar tuition manual in the world. In fact on the news they said that it had sold more copies than all the other guitar books put together, and it might even be true.
You can tell that researchers are running out of things to research, fast. In Australia they researched into the relationship between types of people and the way they vote. They came to the conclusion that the bigger, stronger, and/or aggressive you are, the more likely you are to vote for the right wing.
Although they seem to have baulked at saying it, the obvious conclusion is that the more weedy, vertically challenged, and generally nerdy you are, the more likely you are to vote for the left wing.
They did sweeten the pill a little by pointing out that intelligent people were more likely to vote left, but that may say more about the researchers than anything else. If you were a researcher would you deliberately issue a paper which suggested that you were an idiot? Who'd read it? If you write "By the way, I'm an idiot" on your thesis I can pretty much guarantee it will cost you points.
At least I now know which way I should be voting, and indeed why bankers give so much money to the Conservative party.
Meanwhile, with our medical records soon to go online, and our police and employment records already online, it should soon be possible to cross reference our details and predict how we are most likely to vote, without the need for us to actually do so.
There's going to be a steady flow of internet hackers leaving the UK shores bound for the USA after the EU courts decided that although their crimes took place in Britain, the servers upon which they were committed were in the US.
Using this same logic, companies like Amazon, Ebay, and Paypal are getting away with paying no tax on their UK sales.
Is it really more important that a few hackers get tried abroad than that we recuperate all that money the exchequer is losing?
I've got a simple scheme when it comes to keeping the old petrol tank fed, fill it to burping once every 400 miles. For the last two days I've been driving mum around and about enjoying the summer-tease, and all over the place there are idiots 'topping up' their tanks. There's been at least one punch up, and a roundabout jammed by people queuing on it in the wrong direction, and hardware stores are selling out of jerry-cans which people are filling and storing at home
They're doing it because idiot politicians, including the prime minister, told them to. Unite, the union representing fuel delivery drivers, has taken a vote to strike and the result was a fairly large yes. OH NO! DON'T PANIC!! EVERYONE FILL YOUR TANKS, PUT ON YOUR SAFETY HELMETS, HUNKER DOWN IN THE BUNKER AND TRY TO LOOK NORMAL!!!
There are only two available explanations for this inexplicable behaviour.
1/ The entire conservative side of the government have absolutely no idea of how the anti-strike legislation their predecessor passed, works.
2/ They're deliberately trying to scare us into thinking that Trades Unions are run by satan and his minions.
Having taken the strike ballot the union now has to declare the dates of the strike, giving at least 7 day's notice. Since at the moment the union/employer negotiations haven't even started, it seems unlikely that they will be declaring any dates just yet. I'm guessing that anyone topping up their their tank right about now will have used it up long before the shirt hits the farn.
Of course, it is just possible, with the recession recovery plan currently in reverse gear, that the chancellor of the exchequer is trying to squeeze a little more cash out of us. All those cars wasting petrol driving around in search of somewhere that can sell them some more, then queuing up, burning more of their valuable juice, must be bringing in quite a useful little windfall.
Listen guys. Stop it. Now. Trust me, I'm not a politician.
There's a reason why I can't answer the question when people ask me what kind of music I like. There isn't one. I hear a song, I like it/I don't like it, and that's pretty much it. Here's a case in point. Definitely not the kind of song I would normally like, but every time I hear it I go all flower-child again.
I'm still deciding whether I like this version, Dusty Springfield, or The Lemon Pipers best, but I can safely say I don't like The Byrds version. Fancy screwing around with something that effects me like this.
I've got an intruder in the garden. It just turned up late last year in the middle of the garden looking like nothing I've ever seen before, so I left it to grow a little in the hope that it might turn into something that I recognised.
I don't, but it's got a whole size bigger and there are little ones coming up in the front garden (And sprouting out of the footpath) now.
What is it?
I'm thinking I do know what it is, but I'm sayin' nuthin'...
My Opera
