Great Moments In Retailing: Car Wash, Hessle Road, Hull

Least reassuring claim ever.

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Adventures In Trash: Chapter By Chapter Analysis of “The Vampire Diaries” by L J Smith

Come back Bella and Edward, I didn’t mean any of it If you get my Facebook feed, you’ll know I’ve spent about forty thousand million billion years snarking about all of the forty thousand million billion things that are wrong with Twilight. On the recommendation of a friend – who clearly felt I needed my [...]

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Great Moments In Retailing: Unidentified Carpet Shop, Huddersfield

Once again, this Great Moment comes to you thanks to my brother’s father-in-law Andy, who found and photographed this poor, trapped sheep in a carpet shop in Huddersfield: If it could only replicate that pose just six inches to the left, its little hooves might accidentally push the door-handle down and it would free itself [...]

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Adventures In Trash: Every Word Conan Doyle Ever Wrote With Sherlock Holmes In It (read in under a month)

I’m happy to admit I only decided to read the entire Sherlock Holmes canon because I, like many others, have a thumping great crush on Benedict Cumberbatch. This entire review will be written through the filter of how much I love this TV series, and my primary assumption will be that Gatiss and Moffat have [...]

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Great Moments In Retailing: Underwear Shop, Malaga

Another moment of genius from Andy, my brother’s father-in-law. We’re all trying to persuade him that he should start his own blog, but until that happens, he’s continuing to generously donate his spots to me. I really can’t top Andy’s own Facebook comment on this, so I’m just going to quote it verbatim: “This chap [...]

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Published Work: Forthcoming Flash Fiction Anthology in aid of “One In Four”

Author and blogger Caroline Smailes is putting together a flash-fiction anthology in aid of the charity One In Four, who support victims of sexual violence and abuse. The anthology will contain one hundred flash-fiction stories, each of one hundred words or less, and each inspired by a different song. As someone whose natural authorial style [...]

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Great Moments In Retailing: Spectacularly Unappealing Sandwich, Malaga

Tonight’s Great Moment was kindly provided by my brother’s father-in-law Andy. He saw this while on holiday in Malaga and took a photograph for me. After careful consideration he decided not to order the sandwich. Usually with foreign-language errors, it’s pretty easy to spot what the author was actually getting at, but this one’s defeated [...]

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The Part You Throw Away: Tin Opener

I predict that one day soon, I am going to be on the television. It will be on one of those List programmes that programme makers use to fill late-night slots where almost everyone watching is drunk and a little bit lonely. It will be called something like “Top 100 Stupidest Domestic Accidents” and will [...]

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Adventures In Trash: “Holiday Camp Mystery” by Margaret A Cole

In Which I Attempt To Resurrect An Unjustly-forgotten Classic In a pre-internet age, the “1950s kids solving mysteries” genre was pretty much all about Enid Blyton. If you wanted to enjoy the fun of middle-class kids being as rude as hell to working-class adults and getting away with it, or senior police officers siding with [...]

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Great Moments In Retailing – The Trago Mills Series: Correct Use Of The Shopping Basket

“You WILL use a basket. At ALL TIMES. This is how shopping works in our country. No go away and shop. QUIETLY. And don’t make a mess. “And is it too much to ask that you stay away from the paint? Paint makes us very, very nervous.” “Hang on – wait a – what the [...]

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