Category: Uncategorized

Of course I am going to ride a bike again. I am in no rush to repeat the experience of the last few weeks, and more importantly, I don’t want to put friends, family, and the emergency services through it again, but it isn’t that easy to stop riding a motorcycle. There is still so… Continue reading Who am I kidding?

One of the problems of spending alot of time at home with the TV on, is that you spend alot of time at home with the TV on. I still haven’t succumbed to mainstream daytime TV, but I do leave the TV on News24 in the background (the remote is broken, and it is an… Continue reading Reporting the news, or part of the news?

Saturday June 9th I picked up my brand new motorbike, a Suzuki DL650X.  I wanted to get the engine run in before a Scotland trip that was supposed to start two weeks later on the 23rd, so I put the first 150 miles on it that afternoon and took it out again on the Sunday. … Continue reading New bikes, and hospital.

Everybody knows the rule, time on the tube is your own private time. You don’t look at anybody else, and you certainly don’t talk to them. Well, I’ve had a glimpse into a different world over the past couple of days. Thursday evening I’m on the platform at Liverpool Street, waiting for a tube. There’s… Continue reading Nobody talks on the Underground.

I’m sitting here watching a broadcast of the concert I missed earlier. Not only the Scissor Sisters, but introduced by Kylie. Kylie. I could have been there. There’s no point in going any further, my command of the English language isn’t sufficient to prevent it dropping into obscenities.

One of the parts of my job is that about one week in every five I am on-call. This isn’t usually too onerous and more often than not it just means taking it easy and ensuring I’m near a computer and somewhere with mobile phone reception. If there are events that make it awkward to… Continue reading Is it worth it?

Last September, two days before I went to Tibet, I had a puncture on my bike. Unfortunately the timing meant that it had to wait until I came back from holiday (three weeks later) before it was repaired. Saturday, after coming back from a ride, I’m looking at the rear tyre and see a bit… Continue reading Punctures

A couple of weekends ago, I was shopping in Stanfords and bought a ticket for a talk at the Royal Geographical Society by John Simpson that was being advertised to raise funds for Prisoners of Conscience. I wasn’t sure what to expect, after all, you’d hope a reporter as experienced as he is would be… Continue reading John Simpson

Today’s news is reporting the protests that have been happening to mark three years since the war in Iraq began. This means it is also three years since I was in San Francisco and faced one of the more surreal moments of my life when I turned a corner to be confronted with a wall… Continue reading Three years since the Iraq war began

Oops. Looks like I messed up. One of our partner organisations, with whom I’ve always thought I got on quite well, runs a network called XXX (name changed to protect the party involved). They are currently migrating to XXX2, and last October I noticed that the “xxx3.net” domain was free. For a bit of a… Continue reading Misplaced humour.

Just what the world needs, right? Another “blog.”