Does anyone else remember reading the Hairy Maclary books when they were a small child? I can recall getting them out of the library before I was able to read, but beyond the fact that he came from Donaldson’s Dairy, I can’t remember anything about the storyline at all. In a rather tenuous link from poetry about a milkman’s dog, this post is going to be about hair. If you’re a guy, I suggest that this probably isn’t a theme which you are going to enjoy, and therefore you might be better served by going back and rereading the post on Google Maps (more…)

A colleague has just told me something so truly amazing that I feel the need to post it here in case other people don’t know about it Google have developed a free maps application which is available to download onto your mobile phone. With your phone browser, go to http://www.google.co.uk/xhtml and click on “download google maps” beneath the search box in order to be guided throught the installation process. It takes approximately two minutes to download and then, hey presto, you now have the world’s most amazing application on your mobile (more…)

This post isn’t actually really written by me; it’s more sort of written by Babel Last night he was correcting a post I had written for the JEBsite, and pulled me up on a couple of matters of grammar. He’s a little bit obsessive about grammar Anyway, one of the errors I made was something I wouldn’t even have known was an error, and so he was obliged to explain it to me in detail. I found the explanation very interesting because it was genuinely news to me, and so I thought I’d post it here; firstly, so that I don’t forget it and secondly in case I’m not the only person who didn’t know this already. (more…)

A friend and I were having a chat this morning and I’m thinking of starting a Facebook group for auditors. See below!

You know you’re an auditor when…

You can’t leave home without a hole-punch and a week’s supply of staples… even if you’re just going to the supermarket.

You make jokes about how boring it must be to be an actuary, but secretly you just wish you were earning that much money and would like to date one.

You have stayed in Premier Inns and Travelodges the length and breadth of the country… and you can talk for hours about their relative merits.

Your favourite words in the whole wide world are “no further work proposed”. (more…)

I’ve just had yet another lovely weekend All my weekends seem to be lovely recently; a combination of it being summer and my boyfriend now having a car! This particular weekend was an event which I had been looking forward to and organising for some time - the second annual JEB summer meet-up. We had a summer get-together last year which was very enjoyable but, erm, kind of wet. We were a little unlucky with the weather, having chosen the Saturday after the Friday on which half the Midlands flooded and a location (Stratford-upon-Avon) which was uncomfortably close to a river. We made the best of it last year, but I think a recurrence of the problem would have been a signal from the Big Man in the Sky that JEB really shouldn’t be holding summer meet-ups, and so I spent much of the latter part of the week anxiously watching the sky and frowning at any dark clouds. (more…)

Today I am going to improve your minds Nah, this is prompted by a discussion with a colleague yesterday, during the course of which I was utterly shocked to discover that he was ignorant of what I consider to be a basic and fundamental fact in accounting and mathematics. I expressed my disgust with the intellect of the youth of today to my mother last night, and was equally shocked and horrified that she had no idea what I was talking about either. (more…)

There are lots of reasons why German is a really cool language - far too many to list in their entireity - but here are just a few

1. Being phonetic, it’s so straightforward to pronounce. You get some amazing consonant clusters like “Dschungel” (jungle) and “Tschechien” (Czech Republic).

2. If you’re prone to catarrh, trying to pronounce a word like “Chuchichaeschtli” (Swiss German for kitchen cupboard) is a really great way of clearing your throat.

3. It’s full of genuinely enormous compound words like “Rolltreppenbenutzungshinweise” (tips for using an escalator) and ” Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsg esetz ” (the law which regulates the supervision of beef) (more…)

Yesterday, I went to Primark for the very first time. There’s been a big store in Birmingham city centre for potentially years now, but I’ve never paid very much attention to it. Firstly, because given a choice between a trip to the dentist for an extraction or a shopping expedition for new clothing, I would choose the dental extraction every time. Secondly, because my belief was that it sold fashionable/tacky clothes, and my aim with clothing is to camouflage into the background and not have anyone look twice at me. Thirdly, because I’m sure there have been stories in the news about Primark using child labour or some such to produce their clothes, and that wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to support, even if my boyfriend is about to jump in and tell me in Spanish that child labour is a good thing How did I end up in this infamous store yesterday then and spend in excess of £20? (more…)

Pretty much my entire acquaintance has got in touch with me today to tell me that Littlewoods Direct are using Esperanto in their new advertising campaign. I find it vaguely surprising that so many people I work with read it in the Metro this morning and had a lightbulb moment - “Isn’t that that weird language Clare speaks?!” - then proceeded to text me to let me know. I didn’t think any of them listened to me What surprises me most about this story, however, is the fact that Littlewoods still exists in any form and is having an advertising campaign! I assumed when the catalogue shops disappeared from the high street a few years back that the whole outfit had gone bust (more…)

I’ve just had another really lovely weekend What I’m doing at work at the moment is totally screwed up, but inside I still feel all warm and happy, which makes a pleasant change! It all got off to a rather frustrating start, because my boyfriend was the best part of an hour late to pick me up on Saturday morning Now punctuality isn’t really his strong point, so on the basis that he told me at 11 he’d be with me at one, I was expecting him at one thirty. Nevertheless, by the time it got to one forty-five I was a little annoyed, on the grounds that his drive is just under an hour and thus if he hadn’t been abducted by aliens (forgivable reason for being late), he mustn’t have left work until the time he was supposed to be arriving When he finally arrived around two, it turned out I had maligned him by overlooking a more probable explanation; he had got lost (more…)