All (footballing) thoughts in Walsall are on Tuesday night’s game at the Banks’s in which the Saddlers will take a 2-0 lead over Preston North End into the second leg of the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy Northern Area Final. The prize for the aggregate winners is a visit to Wembley for the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy Final. If […]
Month: January 2015
Even the Royal Mail can’t afford to send letters now!
Today, as a business customer of the Royal Mail, I received a letter from the company’s sales director Graham Davis. The letter was to give me advance notice that postage prices would be “changing” with effect from 30 March; but the letter did not say what the new prices would be. For that I would have […]
The legality of invoicing a child for not turning up to a birthday party
A Twitter conversation between a BBC and ITV hack over the threat of court action for non-payment of a birthday party no-show invoice caught my attention. BBC Newsnight’s Jess Brammar wrote “PM [that’s Radio Four’s PM programme, not the Prime Minister] have just trailed a BBC legal expert analysing the child’s party invoice. *burns everything*”. ITV’s Damon […]
Church of England considers moving the north-south divide
The precise location of the north-south divide has been difficult to pinpoint with any clarity. Manchester is in the north, of course; unless you’re in the Highlands, in which case it is very much in the south. The midpoint of the longest north-south axis in Great Britain is in the village of Haltwhistle in Northumberland […]
Je ne suis pas Charlie; Je suis Gavin
Like just about everybody, I was shocked last week as news emerged of the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the cold bloodied murder of the magazine’s journalists and cartoonists, visitors the office, police officers and, later, customers of a kosher supermarket. And, while I would have liked the terrorists responsible for the attack […]
A journalist with a police caution for domestic violence describes Ched Evans opponents as “morons”
Writing in the week’s Spectator (cover date 10 January 2015, but online now), the columnist Rod Liddle describes opponents of Ched Evans as “morons”. He starts his column with an attack on pseudonymous campaigner Jean Hatchet, saying that her name is “almost certainly too good to be true for a perpetually infuriated radical feminist.” He then […]
Some free advice to hospitals declaring A&E Major Incident status
You do sometimes wonder who is running our NHS hospitals. An increasing number of hospitals are declaring Major Incidents in their Accident and Emergency departments saying that their staff can’t cope with the unprecedented demand. Amongst them is my local A&E department at the County Hospital. You may not have heard of the County Hospital. It […]
Why can’t we have culturally relevant Christian TV in the UK?
In October last year I was invited by Sat-7, the Arabic Christian television network, to visit their studios in Cairo. I was impressed by what I saw: a small team of dedicated professionals committed to serving the church in their locality with culturally-relevant locally-produced programmes. Christians in Egypt are experiencing something of a transformation as […]