Last night I returned to London from Brussels. Unfortunately, my overnight bag didn’t. I guess this was inevitable after four years of multiple short flights in Europe and I have been pretty lucky thus far. Curiously, two other passengers on my flight suffered the same fate. One gentleman was very irate. For reasons best known to himself, he had buried his car keys in his suitcase which seemed a very odd decision. ...

Sort of. I decided to remove all posts from my newly created Habari sandbox in case my readership and GoogleBot gets confused. As there was no obvious bulk deletion tool, I simply truncated the `wp_posts` table. Unfortunately, I truncated the `wp_posts` table from the Wordpress schema instead of the Habari schema. So, in the space of a mere 24 hours, I had managed to lose my favourite boxer shorts, get a brand new shiny blog and then completely trash my established, trusty, stable blog. ...

Dave Grohl’s tribute to Kurt.

27 years ago, in an fruitless attempt to save money, my wife and I hired a function room above a pub to celebrate our joint 40th birthday. With a free bar. We invited friends (both of them), members of the book club and close family, blew up our own red and white balloons, paid extortionate prices for prawn volavons and, in an extravagant measure, even hired a DJ with a Karaoke machine. ...

Over Christmas, I was drying dishes, desperately trying to avoid conversation or being dragged into a impromptu board game. From upstairs, I heard a strange sound; the (discordant) opening chords to ‘Smoke On The Water’ by Deep Purple. Repeatedly. Nothing too surprising there as my 12 year old nephew had been given an electric guitar for Christmas. I asked him who had taught him the three chords and he answered ‘Norman Junior’. It transpired my son has been learning to play guitar with a mate and they are progressing through ‘Monsters of Rock’ classics. ...