This morning I spoke to the Maiden Erlegh Sixth Form as part of their General Studies. I was assured that Labour and Lib Dem representatives have been invited in to speak at later dates to provide balance.             I spoke to them about the changing landscape of ...

They're podgy, hairy, and spend all day eating lunch. Yes, pandas make the perfect diplomats. That was the discovery made by the People's Republic of China in the 1950s, when they started lending pairs of bears to whichever country happened to be in favour. Actually, bear-mail dates to the Tang dynasty, when the Empress Wu Zetian sent a pair to the Japanese Empress; but the explosion in ...

The Brazilian government is likely to move the dates of a key UN environment summit, as a clash with the UK Royal Jubilee threatens to keep leaders away.

Dave Cope, who runs the second hand book company, Left on the Shelf, and Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves Publications have been collecting information on the history of radical bookselling, trying to track down the dates and names of shops from the past, together with references to radical bookshops in fiction and non-fiction. They start from

Timeline of the controversy surrounding the relationship between Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, and his friend Adam Werritty.

BBC Need Another Good Slap  The BBC has, for some petty ridiculous reason, started referring to dates BC as BCE (Before Common Era) and AD (Common Era). Apart from sounding like a quotation from the orange monkey suit from Planet of the Apes, this Christianity-hoovering exercise is ludicrous and an insult to their long term British licence-paying public. As a government-run entity, the BBC ha...

Ministers are to scrap sell-by dates on packaging, saying they are confusing and contribute to the £12bn-worth of food wasted each year.

Trivial in and of itself, yes: Heinz, the American company which bought the famous British brand in 2005, has changed the celebrated concoction that includes tomatoes, malt vinegar, molasses, dates, tamarind and secret spices to reduce the salt content. The previous version of the brown sauce, which has become synonymous with fry-up breakfasts and bacon

A Greenpeace ship evaded its Danish naval pursuers and deployed a boarding party yesterday to disrupt arctic oil drilling. This boarding is Greenpeace’s third recent attempt at offshore oil production disruption, but their use of the tactic dates back to the early 1990s. Comparable to the cliché that one man’s freedom fighter is another man's terrorist; one man’s envi...

It's been a few months since the last entry on this blog and the reason for that is that I had really lost interest in it (honest, if nothing else) and switched mainly to Twitter. Over the years, this blog dates back to 2003, I have had a lot of fun writing it and using it as a tool to communicate with people. However clearly it is now defunct. When I mentioned that I was deleting it, a few p...