You may remember that some time ago I made a series of posts about the appalling quality of service which is offered by Cross Country trains between Birmingham and Leicester. If you don’t remember, you can read about it here and here. Well, it’s time for a long overdue update… (more…)

Working in a corporate environment, you get used pretty quickly to the idea that nobody actually cares. That’s fine, that’s fair enough; no one is being paid to care. But what annoys me, and I mean really, really annoys me, is when they start *pretending* to care! (more…)

Today I finally finished a novel which I have been spasmodically reading for the best part of three weeks – Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott. Having somehow missed Walter Scott out of my childhood literary education, it would never have occurred to me to pick this book up at all had it not been a sort of gift, but I am very glad that I did and will hopefully get around to reading some of his other works in the future. I probably didn’t do it justice at all by reading it in such a disjointed fashion and over such a prolonged period of time, but nevertheless I enjoyed it immensely (more…)

How many people, I wonder, were as sad as me and spent all week looking forward to that most fantastic of all comedy shows – the Eurovision song contest? I had a thoroughly enjoyable evening, although it was a little sad that for the first time ever I wasn’t able to watch it with my sister. She kept in touch throughout the competition though to be updated on what Wogan was saying and to give us a flavour of the German commentary. The German presenter was apparently taking things quite seriously, and after the UK entry announced in surprise, “What is happening? The British have actually entered a decent song!” (more…)

Being in a mood where I have lots of important things to do and am anxious not to do any of them, I decided to conduct a survey of my Facebook acquaintance. This was prompted by the fact that yet another person who I would never have expected in a million years to add me as a friend, just did. My policy when someone adds me as a friend on Facebook is to click yes, even if I dislike the person intensely. This is partly because I have an insatiable curiousity to read about what people are doing with their lives, and partly because I don’t like being consciously rude. (more…)

How do you read the following sentence?

Opportunityisnowhere. (more…)

I haven’t bitten the bullet and started my annual appraisal yet, but I have just been writing a couple of individual job appraisals. In particular, I have written a rather lengthy one for the two clients I audited in London in April. I have been talking to one of my friends today about life, the universe and why it’s all making me so terribly unhappy, and I’ve reached the conclusion that if I get nothing but negative comments for those particular audits, then I am going to quit my job. (more…)

And so this evening I find myself sitting in a freezing cold room at The Manor again. My mood has not much improved as the day has progressed and I am not impressed to be spending my Sunday evening here I just text one of my friends who has a car and thus doesn’t need to travel down until tomorrow morning, and we have made a pact together not to do the pre-course work. It only just actually occurred to me that there might be pre-course work, since no one had emailed me to request I do it. I dutifully logged into the relevant part of our intranet and downloaded it, but once I’d read a fraction of it, I decided I wasn’t going to do it. It is far too late and too cold to be calculating overhead absorption rates. Having a Maths degree, I am not very good at sums at the best of times anyway So yeah, I text my friend to ask if she had done the pre-course work and was suitably encouraged when she replied, “No, what’s the course actually on?” (more…)

I was feeling very depressed yesterday, so I decided to go to Malvern. The real reasons for feeling depressed were manifold, but the catalyst for deciding to do something so random was the fact that I couldn’t get to Leicester to have lunch with my boyfriend. Three months on, Cross Country trains persist in running rail replacement buses every weekend and are stubbornly ignoring my letter of complaint. Since my boyfriend had to be at work by quarter past two, and the journey from my house to Leicester essentially takes the best part of three hours when factoring in a bus via Coleshill, I would have to have got up at seven to have arrived at eleven and have three hours with him. Incredibly nice as my boyfriend is, it didn’t seem worth it. In fact, after the exhausting week I’ve had, I couldn’t have faced getting up that early for anyone (more…)

…is now due to Babel who has done something amazing with my website If you look at the sidebar you will see that it is displaying one out of a collection of several utterly adorable pictures of ducks. I’ve no idea how he did it, but by some piece of magic there will now be a random duck displayed every time I click on the homepage, which is rather exciting. I would say he was the best boyfriend ever, were it not for the fact that he persists in cultivating a ridiculous moustache