September 12th - September 18th 2005
Sunday Oh boy
Saturday Trafalgar Square
Friday Tiny, fingers
Thursday Woody
Wednesday Death tolls
Tuesday Transported
Monday 3 bottle man
Sunday 18th September 2005
After a long period of considerable strain at work, during which it looked as if breasts and a cheerful manner were to be considered more than adequate qualification for traineee journalism, we have recently had a minor influx of young, male (and, hurrah!, not entirely stupid) interns.
Which is probably why, when one of them breezily enquired if anybody needed anything from the canteen, I heard myself say, "I'll have a boy sandwich."
Okay, so I didn't say it loud enough for anyone to hear, but Andy is probably right when he texted me last week: "Ur going to suck cocks in hell mr."
Saturday 17th September 2005
Trafalgar Square, Autumn 2005
Friday 16th September 2005
Tiny Rembrandt may fetch £6.7m (following confession by Fingers van Dyck presumably.)
Thursday 15th September 2005
This started out as a project to live in the Woods for six weeks in order to raise sponsoship for the woodland trust. Six weeks was easy(ish) so now the project is being extended for as long as I can last - the aim being for 1 year. I live in the woods, I have no other address it is where I live. 12 months is the target, the question is how long will I last. 
- Ditch Monkey (a blog from a ditch)
Wednesday 14th September 2005
Death tolls page updated to include at least 1000 people who died last month after rumours of a suicide bomber caused panic during a religious pilgrimage in Baghdad.
Tuesday 13th September 2005
Do you ever stop to consider how boring public transport would be without the other passengers?
Imagine being required to do all your travelling with an entire compartment to yourself. (Can you even remember the last time that happened?)
No listening to other people's tinny headphones, admittedly. No skanky black girls shouting incomprehensibly down their mobile phones, admittedly. No fat blokes browsing their interminable ring-tones, admittedly.
But no bovine middle-aged couples to pity. No smouldering foreigners wearing t-shirts that say 'Fuck the tourist'. Nothing in trousers, at all.
Double that for escalators. When I'm not toning up my cardio-vascular system by sprinting up the fast lane (or adding interesting facial scars by falling down the slow one), the only thing that makes that stately ascent even remotely bearable is ogling the people descending just across the way.
Which makes the installation of a new escalator at Vauxhall doubly cruel (as if we hadn't suffered enough through the new bus station, only to discover the same utterly inadequate services after they finally finished it).
Plywood partitions seal off the view, meaning you have no choice other than to read the adverts that slide past you on the left, or the PR material from London Underground on the right.
Browsing the latter, I even found myself mildly (I did say mildly) interested by the revelation that every new escalator has to be assembled from scratch.
Until I contemplated the alternative, and found myself imagining some vast storehouse in the outer suburbs, with a brown coated assistant behind a counter at the very front and, behind him, stretching way into the distance...
Monday 12th September 2005
Pitt would become known as a 'three bottle man', a reference to his heavy consumption of port wine.
The possibility that he drank up to three bottles of port at a single sitting on a fairly regular basis has always seemed to modern observers to be either rather unlikely or highly eccentric.
Several facts must be borne in mind... ...Taken together, these facts imply that three bottles of port in Pitt's day would be roughly equivalent to one and two thirds of a bottle of strong wine today.
This is still a large amount of alcohol to consume, but not an unimaginable one.
- William Hague imagining he's telling us about 18th century politics but inadvertently revealing rather more about contemporary politicians.
......previous week
