Uk

9/11 - The Falling Man

A Channel 4 documentary about 9/11 and the controversial photographs capturing the final seconds of people who jumped to their deaths.

Harrowing and yet compulsive viewing. Not for everyone and the sort of program you might expect a warning about the content (21:00-22:30) which some may find disturbing, upsetting or offensive.

Instead, Channel 4 announce ‘This program contains images and video footage featuring repetitive patterns that may cause problems for people with photosensitive epilepsy’. Bizarre. Truly bizarre.

unfortunate choice of words

There is a terribly sad story in the UK about clinical trials that have gone (badly) wrong leaving six people critically ill in hospital.

Radio 5 carried an interview with a person who has taken part in previous trials. He was so full of praise for Parexel that I thought he was a stooge.

That was, until, he uttered the unfortunate words

‘So, 1,000 GBP for one trial and 750 GBP for the second. For a student, that is a lot of money and can actually be life-changing’

Read more

unused, unwanted, unloved

No - not another ‘poem’ from an angst ridden, lovesick teenager listening to Joy Division and Morrissey.

Two months after Christmas, I finally got around to playing ‘X&Y’ by Coldplay. As I suspected, this is pure dinner party music but the singles are pleasant enough on the radio when driving.

Chris Martin seems well intentioned but there is something unsettling about his intentionally unkempt hair, his children’s names and the plethora of multi-coloured wrist and finger bands he wore at Live 8.

poor man's satellite navigation

Buy one of these for 10 GBP. Give to partner as early Valentine present. Jot down following notes as contingency in case navigator happens to be asleep during crucial section around Antwerp ring road.

Folkestone. Eurotunnel to Calais
E40 Ostende
E40 Bruges
E40 Gent
E17 Antwerp
E34 Eindhoven

If you note the time and zero the trip-o-meter, you can even get statistics on your journey.

the black stuff

Had a drink in The Plough in Hemel Hempstead last night.

Conveniently located for the Buncefield Oil Refinery, The Plough offers fine ales and traditional English fare.

Bad news: Guinness was off.

Good news. Bitter and lager looked and tasted just like Guinness

Food: Sausages and mash with black pudding. Gravy was greasy, a little oily in fact.

breaking news

Good news. A kind, thoughtful, considerate colleague noticed my unattended Palm and placed it in a locked drawer for safe keeping. Unusually, for such a kind, thoughtful and considerate person, he omitted to send me a note telling me.

Bad news. I will be writing my own Christmas cards this year.

The planned filming of the reconstruction next Wednesday, to be broadcast on this month’s edition of BBC Crimewatch, has now been cancelled.

stampede at London Waterloo

Last night, I was standing at London Waterloo station, sincerely hoping that the engineer would be able to fix the carriages for my train home.

Suddenly, there was a stampede of people rushing past me. What on earth was happening ? Was this some spontaneous act of flash mobbing ? Had a train arrived unexpectedly at platform 4 for those impatient people from Basingstoke ? Or was there some sort of inaudible terrorist alert mumbled by the station announcer that I had missed ?

credit card security

Yesterday, I had a credit card transaction rejected which is always a little embarrassing. Thankfully, this was over the phone and not in a shop where embarrassed people would quickly avert their gaze, thinking ‘Poor man, he’s probably lost his job. Just look at his clothes’.

Normally, such rejections happen because the card number or expiry date was incorrectly transcribed and are quickly resolved - ‘No I said 6079 at the end’.

surreal Sunday

Amazing news - whales have feelings and can understand humans.

‘How a wave of human compassion will have comforted the whale in his final hours’

‘He’d have known we’re trying to help but it couldn’t save him’

But what was really amusing about the bottlenose whale stranded in the River Thames story was that a friend recently returned from a holiday in Canada where he went whale watching. He was unlucky and saw absolutely nothing apart in a whole day apart from the bobbing waves. He then returns home to London to find one sitting on his doorstep.

revenge of the BAA queue monitor

This morning at some unearthly hour, I found myself standing once again in the queue to clear security at Heathrow Terminal 4. I was almost at the X-ray machine when a member of staff approached me and invited me to ‘volunteer’ for a full body scan.

He took me behind some screens and for one moment I feared the BAA queue monitors were going to exact their terrible revenge for my outspoken criticisms last week. However, he explained that the body scanner would take three scans of my body, each of which would pass a small amount of radiation through my body.