What a surreal weekend, everywhere you turned it was either Glastonbury or Micheal Jackson, or stories about how news of MJs death spread at Glastonbury.

In the end, most right thinking people - by which I mean not those people holding all night vigils outside the hospital or on the sidewalk by his Hollywood Star, whilst weeping or blaming 'them' for persecuting 'him' - will probably agree that Michael Jackson made an enormous contribution to the world of music, and pop in particular, and that he was at his best when younger and lets face it, less weird. Another victim of his own success and the people who in a desire to 'milk the cash-cow' enabled his eccentricities and spiralling decline.

He has left us. And left us a legacy of great pop to remember him by.

I will also remember this weekend for the less than fabulous night I spent trying to sleep while the celebrants of stag nights and hen do's (identifiable by their flourescent items of clothing, bunny ears and/or pink sashes) staggered around Brighton. The boys more staggery than the girls because to compensate for their lack of identifying outfits, as described above, the boys had gone for a uniformity of consumption of cheap alcohol, especially it would appear Strongbow, the portable can of choice.

This alone would have been less troublesome but for the unfortunate positioning of our hotel room near the entrance to Madame Geisha's nightclub, the poor performance of the Hotel's double-glazing and in particular the emergence of some drunken idiothole at about 3am looking for WENDDDYYYY! And not quietly or productively it would appear, as either WENDDDYYYY! was long gone, or sensibly in my opinion, was having nothing to do with this particular buffoon.

One suspects that one of the reasons for the absence of said WENDDDYYYY may hve been her avid paramour's inability to articulate, walk rather than stagger, or most importantly, to communicate - in anything less than a bellow - the single word WENDDDYYYY repeatedly, which one imagines is a level of dedication likely to become tiresome quite quickly.

Happily I can report that either the lovelorn fool lost the use of his vocal chords or more hopefully fell into the sea and drowned, because after what only felt like an interminable time, peace was restored, by which I mean music plus the screams of laughing girls, assorted sirens and other miscellaneous sounds produced by the midnight to 4am set.

There's nothing like waking on a Sunday morning in a beautiful coastal town after very little sleep to remind one never to book a 'centrally located, covenient for all amenities' hotel ever again, regardless of the circumstances.

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Yeah, well, my usual infrequent posting has been further sabotaged by a decision to return to Twitter. As a result I have stopped thinking in posts and changed my brain to 140 character limit tweets.
Read about a million books since I last posted an update and given up more of my living space to designer toys, so 'Life' goes on even if it's not reaching these pages.
May embark on a retrospective recap, or may not bother. Am a few bottle-conditioned ales into a barbeque, with a failing iPhone battery so will stop for now and tend to the sausages!!

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So I thought I'd give Twitter another go... A second chance to engage me. Having tried it out for maybe two months about a year ago I just wasn't getting it, maybe I was following the wrong people, or maybe I'm too boring to post interesting enough 140 character summaries...

Anyway, there's no doubt I've seen a lot more evidence of tweeting in the last year and having read a couple of good reviews of free iPhone apps (icon factory's Twitterific and Twitterfon) thought it would be worth trying again. Am hoping to "get it" this time, but maybe it's like Marmite, you either love it or hate it - personally I love it, but the jury's still out on Twitter.

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So here we are again at the Falkland Arms in wonderful Great Tew, Oxfordshire. This is the umpteenth visit and we must have stayed nearly ten times, the big difference this time however is that the pub has changed hands - not the brewery, it's still a Wadworth Pub, but the licencees - gone are the welcoming and professional SJ and Paul, and to be blunt the place just ain't the same without them.

Now it would appear that the new licencees took over in Jan 2008, and due to particular circumstances we hadn't been to stay since 2007, so although we'd made a couple of visits and not seen SJ or Paul we put this down to bad timing. So it was a bit of a shock to find strangers in charge at our favourite pub. And that wouldn't matter if a lot of small changes hadn't also made it feel like a strange and decidedley ordinary place instead of a wonderful one.

Add to this a significant drop in the quality of the food and we're already talking about finding another pub to take over as our all time favourite.

What a shame. What have Wadworth allowed to happen to this flagship pub? And what happened to SJ and Paul? Why did they give up what appeared to be an idillyic pub in an idillyic setting. What could they have found that was more appealing? Except maybe a job where you're not working 365 days a year I suppose...

Oh, and it's four minutes to one in the morning and the crowd in the bar is still making a racket that's gonna stop me sleeping until the useless bastards in charge chuck these noisey f*#^kers out. Have they nae got homes to go to?

Bugger.

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It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how hard I try I cannot get things wrapped up comfortably before starting a period of annual leave. So there I am today with one task to complete and three others appear out of the woodwork and although I get a lid on these new challenges that one task now has a complication.

One thing to add with a hour to go, should be simple but then the content management system chooses that exact moment to crash... Bolleaux !!

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Today I have been mostly eating.

And eating...
Chocolates, biscuits, chocolate and just to be sure more chocolate!

People have been sending edible treats to the whole team, plus Cassie the Christmas Elf snuck in this morning and left gifts, including biscuits for everyone. Add to that a possibly unwise decision to go for a bacon sandwich for breakfast this morning and you have Christmas excess starting in earnest.

Honestly you could have fed a small country on the edible delights proffered today just around our office. If you scale that up you could probably tackle world hunger (assuming the world wants chocolate - which lets face it they don't). Pity my stomach if this continues through the festive season - not to mention the expanded waistband I shall need by New Year...

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Today I have been mostly Christmas shopping...

But now I am rewarding myself with a session in the Turf Tavern, Oxford's most tourist-y pub but the best place for real ale in Oxford and alway buzzing with activity.

The beers we drank today were:
Sadlers Thin Ice
Ossett Silver Link
Elgoods Cambridge Bitter
Banks & Taylors Shefford Bitter
Elgoods Greyhound
Morlands Original

Thanks Darren and your crew for making us as welcome as ever :-)

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Today I have been mostly sitting in a hospital waiting room

In fact 6 hours of waiting for a 20 minute cataract operation... All I can say in their defence is that it's a nice hospital with friendly staff.

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What a joy it is to meet up again with friends one has not seen for years. I was lucky enough to make contact again today with a friend I had long thought lost to the vagaries of time and my appallingly grumpy and unsociable nature!

However what I couldn't help but notice is that while I have been steadily chewing up the several years between this meeting and the last (7...?, 8...?, 9...?) whatever, some significant amount at least, my dear friend has either been travelling with the Doctor in his clever blue box and skipped the intervening years entirely, or stored in her attic is a portrait of a steadily declining figure. Face to face she is literally unchanged.

Not that I consider this terribly unfair, but I'd just love to know the secret.

I promise not to tell... ;-)

Today I have been mostly in meetings

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So here it is; the latest app to make it onto my iPhone, specifically designed to help me post to LiveJournal while 'on the go' - not that I think I've ever been 'on the go' in my life. Is it only the jet-set, business executives, and Americans, who can exist in a state of 'on the go'?

"Today I have been mostly packing a suitcase"

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Robert Matheson, I Am Legend
Douglas Coupland, All Families are Psychotic
Terry Darlington, Narrow Dog to Carcassonne
Robert Crais, Demolition Angel
Marina Warner, The Dragon Empress
Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan
Peter Robinson, Friend of the Devil
Terry Pratchett, Making Money
Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom
Raymond Chandler, Farewell My Lovely
Terry Darlington, Narrow Dog to Indian River
Maj Sjowal, The Terrorists (A Martin Beck novel)
M.C. Beaton, The Potted Gardener
Bernard Cornwell, Pale Horesman
Peter Lovesey, Diamond Solitaire
Robert B. Parker, Spare Change
Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979