Had lots of fun yesterday. It wasn’t the best of starts when my son bounded in at 6am and jumped onto the bed (grrrrr), but it did make us get on with the day. We packed the picnic, and then off to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The YSP was good. We choose a particularly bad […]

It’s my 33rd birthday tomorrow. Well, technically it’s the 33rd anniversary of my one and only birth day. I’ll just stop there. In my old workplace we would have called it james++. I’m excited about my birthday this year, for the first time in several years. I’m not a great party animal, but the last […]

I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I hadn’t realised that Torchwood is an anagram of Doctor Who. If we’re on the subject of embarrassing lack of knowledge, I also didn’t realise that 3G phones use GSM for voice – which destroys my main objection to getting one (i.e. that the coverage for normal phone use […]

On Wednesday, the snow arrived. About a foot came down overnight in Boston – other places got a lot more. This was enough to disrupt various airports, which meant the people who were supposed to arrive from Virginia that day couldn’t make it, so we all had the afternoon off. Having been a day late […]

One of my the people I was working alongside has all but emigrated to America, and now lives in California. He claims that there are basically two types of Restaurant in the US – really nice ones, with good service, decent food, edible portion sizes, but not necessarily too expensive… and complete dives that dump […]

American beckons! Very smooth flight over. The films very Marie Antoinette (which wasn’t all that) and Man of the Year which was absolutely, and unexpectedly, awesome! Very very funny. I wasn’t going to bother watching it, until I heard everyone else on the plane laughing, so decided to plug in the headphones. Glad I did. […]

I’ve now been told by two different people that I’ve got Amsterdam all wrong, and am basing my opinion the sleezy bit – which I guess is a fair enough comment. If I’d arrived in London for the first time on a wet February afternoon and spent an hour walking around either Kings Cross or […]

I’m afraid I was very dull at Amsterdam, and checked in to the nearest hotel, in this case the Sheraton. I considered getting a train into town to find one there, but I didn’t know how the trains worked, and I had all my bags with me, so the Airport Sheraton it was. Very nice […]

This entry was more wry the first time I wrote it, but it appears to have vanished without a trace so I’m not feeling wry anymore. Probably not a bad summary of the whole trip, actually!! That said, the trip started off ok, really – in as much as “starting” means “getting to the airport […]

One thing I forgot to mention was that we were there for the start of Lent, which of course meant Shrove Tuesday – Mardi Gras! To mark this event, there was a carnival in Funchal which we all went to. It was actually quite fun – lots of people walked by, or came by on […]