All posts by Chris

I made up a quick quiz for our Christmas party last night, and one or two people asked if they could have copies to recycle at their own gatherings, so here it …

If you haven’t seen it yet, the Cambridge Independent is a major new weekly newspaper for the area. I’ve really put this blog post up because a month after its launch, the newspaper still hasn’t managed to get Google to …

Earlier this year I was part of a small group which organised a hustings event for a local council election here in Cambridge. We think it was a great success, and a real asset to local democracy. One or two …

I’m writing this in the aftermath of the EU membership referendum, and the result is still very raw. I’m probably not alone around here in having almost all of my friends, colleagues and neighbours having voted ‘remain’, and not having …

Denmark: makes the news in May.

I’m sure that some of you may take these predictions for 2016 and somehow make money out of them, because they’re guaranteed**, but nevertheless, on this new year’s day, I’m going to tell you …

The Christmas After-Lunch Picture Quiz has become a bit of a tradition in our family, and I thought I’d post this year’s here on the blog so that if any of you …

So, I didn’t manage to see 52 new cinema-release movies this year, despite the best of intentions. To date I’ve seen 47, although there may be time for one or two more, if our local cinema can afford to stop …

One of the joys of streaming audio is that you can listen to new music all year long and just file away anything you particularly like into a “best of the year”playlist. Here it is on Spotify if you fancy …

I’ve found in the past that relating travel and parking experiences here always seems to be useful to people, so here’s another one, this time relating to parking at Stanmore for Wembley Stadium events. This was something we tried in …

This is a poem by Paul Cookson (above), who I’ve had the pleasure of seeing perform, and who once inspired my son when doing one of those school visits which so many authors undertake. I hope Paul won’t mind me …

Here in Cambridge’s Queen Edith’s ward, we consider ourselves to be very much part of the city, so it’s strange that the parliamentary boundary of the Cambridge constituency rather oddly puts us outside of the city. Unsurprisingly, folks round …

Just in time! I set myself the extremely ambitious target of watching 52 movies released in 2014 during the year, and made it by binge-watching (for me) four movies in four days up to New Year’s Eve. Admittedly my target …

(Updated regularly)

This post lists what I’ve found out about parking at the Greenwich, London O2 Arena (the old Millennium Dome), and my experience of event parking there. I hope it’s useful, and please use the comments to add anything …

For the last couple of years I’ve managed to come up with a top 100 songs of the year, but (disturbingly), I couldn’t find 100 I really like this year. To be fair, with three weeks of the year to …

Summer 2014…

We’re just back from a fabulous 14-day cruise around the Baltic on Celebrity Eclipse and for the benefit of future cruise passengers planning their trip, I thought I’d do a quick port guide. Of course, your exact itinerary …

So, with the help of a Cineworld Unlimited card, my target this year has been to see one film a week on the big screen. Not too much of a hardship, and at the halfway stage I’ve nearly done …

I just noticed that the aerial views on Bing Maps are still showing the plot on which our house stands, before it was developed …so I thought I’d record them here for posterity. The old house really looks quite a …

You rarely see serious forecasts of the European elections on a regional (constituency) basis, mainly because the proportional voting system makes it much harder than “first past the post” systems. But I thought I’d take a look, spurred on by …

Back in 2012, my wife and I were walking down Hills Road, returning from having voted in a local election, when we ran into some neighbours, walking towards the Polling Station. “Off to vote then?”, I asked. They shook …

We resurrected an old site this week at the instigation of one of my business clients: CAD-Reviews.com was originally set up to host an archive of CAD software reviews done by my old friend Colin Mathews, and the site has …

So, if you’ve just arrived here from a web search, it’s probably because you’ve just come across the Google Docs/Google Drive error message “Sorry, cannot transfer ownership to xxxx. Ownership can only be transferred to another user in the same …

A fantastic year for music for me, not necessarily because it was a fantastic year for music in general, but because I listened to about ten times as much new music as I’ve ever done in any one year in …

Christmas approaches, and that means it’s time for my Films Of The Year. By the looks of my email ticket confirmations from the Arts Picturehouse and the rather splendid myCineWorld Booking History page, I would appear to have seen about …

I caught a member of my family griping about Apple’s iOS7 operating system yesterday, saying the new font used system-wide was too light to read easily. “What about people with seriously impaired vision?”, she said. “Surely they make allowance for …

I’m pleased this morning to be part of the launch of OnVid.co.uk, a new site which is setting out to highlight the best YouTube channels from the UK. Covering a whole range of subjects, the site will chronicle the …