One of the problems for people who trawl through their site statistics from time to time is a tendency to start looking at them too regularly and trying to find patterns which don’t actually exist. This is when you start asking yourself things like “how come my page visits are 0.3% down on last month?”. [...]

I’m quite into local history and finding out about stuff I didn’t know, so I’m quite a fan of Heritage Open Days, where you generally get a chance to see certain historical thingummies and find out about them for free. Obviously, the “for free” part is another thing which adds to the attractiveness of the [...]

Okay, so maybe it’s not quite like James Bond, but the other week I went on a short little training course/seminar thingummy run by HMRC about the taxes and regulations relating to people becoming self-employed, to basically look at what I need to do in order to start trading under the TPis banner. As yet, [...]

So, here we go: only a couple of weeks left before I am officially made redundant, and there’s still a lot left to be doing. Obviously, regular readers (or at least those who visit my blog via the actual site, rather than the feed-reader types) will know that I’m looking to go into business for [...]

Hmm. I appear to be my own boss. This is not exactly through choice; it’s because the recession has led to my employer feeling obliged to give me a month’s notice. After the initial bit of feeling somewhat shell-shocked, and saying things on the phone like “uh-huh. uh-huh” without really making a great deal of [...]

Sometimes there’s things about my local area and/or my local authority that I am a bit ashamed of. Sometimes there’s things about my local area and/or my local authority that I am proud of. Saltwell Park represents both of these, displaced somewhat in time. When I was studying for my GCSEs, I did a project [...]

I have a nagging feeling that the teachers at my son’s school might have got the somewhat erroneous impression that I’m a racist, fascist bigot. Although it’s also possible that they might not have got this impression. Either way, the mere possibility of this impression occurring is not something that is likely to occur on [...]

It was one of our “family outing thingummies”. There’s currently an event on in NewcastleGateshead (the gestalt entity formed from Newcastle and Gateshead councils to promote events across the two) called EAT! Newcastle Gateshead, which is not, as it may initially sound, a command to consume the region, but is instead a festival of food. [...]

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen something of a return to our ‘Summer Days Out’ plan where at least once every weekend we try to take a trip out somewhere with the kids, to see something a bit different (you know, other than “shops”) and generally have a nice family day out. Discovery Museum [...]

I had thought that it might be nice to mark the occasion of the 1,000th post on this blog with a special post. Unfortunately, it would appear that I’ve missed it. If you delve back through my archives, you will see that technically, I’ve produced more than 1000 blog posts by now, as I did [...]