ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

I was on the Team Valley ‘Retail World’ retail park the other day, sitting in a coffee shop tucked away in Borders bookshop. I’m presuming it was a Starbucks as they are pretty much ubiquitous but it could theoretically have been ‘Costa Coffee’ or something similar. Not that this is really relevant, but there you […]

Read: Interest Free »

Earlier on in the season, I mentioned Gateshead FC: I could get used to this, in reference to the fact that my local non-league club had won their first seven games of the season, and were flying towards promotion from the Unibond Premier League to the Blue Square North.
(For those of you not up on […]

Read: Chasing Promotion »

The multi-storey car park in Gateshead’s town centre is an ugly, rotting, concrete lump.
Except for some reason Wikipedia describes it thus:
Trinity Centre Multi-Storey Car Park is an iconic concrete structure in Gateshead, north-east England. Designed by Owen Luder, it is a prime example of Brutalist architecture. The structure has a prominent role in the 1971 […]

Read: Knock The F***er Down »

I’m coming at this post from a number of angles. Firstly, the beer “Jobling’s Swinging Gibbet”, is produced by a North Eastern brewer, the Jarrow Brewery. Secondly, this is a beer that’s frequently on at the Newcastle Beer festival, and that’s only about a month away. Thirdly, it’s an unusual name, and it — and […]

Read: Will Jobling’s Swinging Gibbet »

I work in the Public Sector. I used to work in the Private sector. Except now the Private Sector company I used to work for is to move to the public sector after all, it appears…
Northern Rock is to be nationalised, the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston has learned.
A consortium led by the Virgin group […]

Read: The Rock Goes Public »

Come on, don’t pretend you didn’t hear about it.
Easington Council in County Durham paid for an exorcism to help get rid of a poltergeist that was disturbing the tenants. You might have come across the story on BBC News, on Sky News, in The Sun, the Daily Mail and rather oddly in this is London […]

Read: Ghostbusting in the North East »

I never knew John George Pickard. He died quite some time before I was born.
So why should I write an ‘in memoriam’ to someone I never really knew, and only know the barest facts about? There’s three main reasons. Firstly, while I might not know much about him, no-one has ever tried to tell his […]

Read: In Memoriam: John George Pickard »

Ah, it’s only a few more short months until the next Newcastle Beer Festival. I’ve been attending the Beer Festival for some years now, and certain traditions have developed.
Firstly, I book holiday from work. That’s essential. Not, as you might expect because I’m going to end up getting so drunk that I’m incapable of […]

Read: The Newcastle Beer Festival »

Just imagine a purely hypothetical scenario where some of your colleagues are returning to work after their first game in a new five-a-side football league for employees of your organisation. Innocently, you ask how they got on, only to be met with rather flinty looks and the information that they had managed to lose by […]

Read: And I thought Newcastle were bad… »

Or to put another way “what century are we in again?”
I accept that I probably know more about disability rights than most of my non-disabled friends, because of my interest in web accessibility, my passion for equality of opportunity (including as it relates to race, gender, sexual preference and the like), but even so, I […]

Read: Disability Discrimination »