Latest Posts:
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On Marriage..
This article about marriage is pretty depressing. Not because the number of marriages is falling, you understand. That doesn’t really bother me. But let’s take a look. For the first time ever fewer than 2 in 100 women, over the age of 16, got married in a single year. In 2008 the marriage rate for women…
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SouthEastern SnowFail: The End
About a week ago I wrote to SouthEastern Railway’s Public Affairs Manager, asking him two questions that could be answered with a simple yes or no. I didn’t get a yes or no answer to either, and when I pushed for a straight answer to one of them the gentleman in question simply stopped replying…
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South by SouthEastern, continued.
The fallout from SouthEastern Railway’s utter failure to cope with the recent snow continues, and you’ll find a good summary of the latest developments here. One thing to add is that, of the three politicans I contacted, one has sent a proper reply. Bridget Prentice MP (for Lewisham East) confirmed receipt of my letter via…
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SouthEastern Railways – the Network Rail response
On Tuesday night, with snow forecast for the South East, SouthEastern railways introduced an emergency timetable for Wednesday. As it happens, South Eastern London didn’t see that much snow, but with fewer and shorter trains serving the area on Wednesday morning, Hither Green station looked a bit like this: All the trains were packed, and…
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Ten Tokyo Travel Tips
It’s been a while since we returned from Japan. I’m not even going to attempt to explain what it was like – just go, see, enjoy – but I did think I’d jot down a few tips for anyone planning a similarly short visit to Tokyo. And so here’s the ten things that I’d absolutely…
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Road trip, day three: Julian, the Laguna Mountains and Ocean Beach
Wanting to see what lies inland and down the back roads, I headed south down the “Palms to Pines Highway” – Highway 74. This turned out to be a lucky choice. After leaving Palm Springs (and passing the BigHorn gated community, as seen on TV, en-route) the road becomes a crazy, winding pass up into…
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Road trip, day two: Laguna Beach to Palm Springs
The drive east into the desert and the Coachella valley should take around two hours, and I got off on a flying start by crashing the car. Whee. Ironically I’d negotiated the freeways of LA safely, and was doing two miles an hour in a petrol station outside Corona (where Fender guitars are made, fact…
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Road trip, day one: Del Mar to Laguna Beach
You cannot, of course, see all of California in three days. In fact, with San Francisco a good nine hours away from San Diego, you could lose the best part of a day just driving up the state and back again. With that in mind, and while sitting in a shopping mall in Del Mar,…
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Hitting the road
Travel certainly rates as one of the most pleasant surprises of my job: before joining Dennis as a Staff Writer I had no idea that magazine work would ever require a passport. As it is, I’ve done plenty of mundane travel around the UK – exploring the glamour of Sutton Coldfield, for example – but…