Small Beds and Large Bears

Anyone who has never had to have their ears syringed won’t know what a life-changing experience it is. I say this up front because otherwise such people won’t understand why I would write a blogpost about the experience, let alone such a laudatory one as this.
My ears had started to get blocked earlier this year, [...]

My parents spent a great deal of time on my junior orthodontics. Not money, though, thankfully: NHS dentistry was much easier to access in my youth (although read on for more news about that.) Still, the months I spent all braced up would, you’d expect, encourage me to look after my teeth into adulthood. Especially [...]

Long-suffering bedwatchers will be dismayed to hear that I spoke too soon and am back on a course of antibiotics for my stomach. My old friend H Pylori, or possibly some relative thereof, might well have returned according to my doctor. Obviously there’ll be some basic human sympathy in that dismay, but I imagine a [...]

I went jogging this weekend, for the first time in well over a year. I’d largely stopped doing so for a number of reasons. Back at the old house I had to be ready to cycle up to 100 miles a week, which meant jogging seemed a bit of a liability. I have some threads [...]

When the weather isn’t miserable of an evening, the night-time commute makes for a good cycle. Before the light pollution in Witney really takes over the sky, the landscape is picked out in cool shades of blue-white: from the moon (when it’s around: it doesn’t make another appearance until the 17th or so) or from [...]

I’ve been ill. And it’s quite possible that I’ve had swine flu. When the disease isn’t busy being more infectious or—rarely—fatal than normal flu, its symptoms are meant to be reminiscent of either weak flu or a severe cold. Also, many people we know from London have had it or know someone who has, and [...]

We’ve finally spent all of our wedding-gift Ikea vouchers, thank Christ. Not that we weren’t grateful for receiving them in the first place, of course: the final bill was reduced by an order of magnitude, which was a welcome surprise. And not that I don’t on one level like Ikea: the remarkably well laid-out showrooms [...]

My winter blues—or undiagnosed SAD, or call it what you will—broke on Friday, like a fever. I’d spent two weeks feeling like I was being stretched thinner and thinner, always running to stand still both at work and at home: or so it seemed to me. But then over the course of a day the [...]

Brennig seems to have had a lovely weekend, the bastard. In comparison, I’ve had a couple of days of traipsing around getting and then using a carpet cleaner, fixing my brakes, and working out strategies to get rid of mice without actually buying traps or sledgehammers.
That’s right, the murine infiltration has begun again, in scratchy, [...]

Misogynist, misguided, cake-headed, fake-furred, philosophically challenged starey-eyed vegaloons PETA continue to objectify women with their advertising campaigns, also merely incidentally saying something or other about, oh, vegetarianism or whatever. Stop thinking and look at the norks, you peasants.
PETA embody everything hateful about antifeminism from the beauty myth downwards. We’ve been here before, of course, and [...]