News Archives: June 2003

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

New online opinion column

The latest online opinion column has just been published. Who Should Be Ashamed? is a piece on the continued refusal of the pro-war lobby to engage with the criticisms being levelled at them. Partly written as an answer to this piece by William Shawcross, and Shawcross's astoundingly crass performance on Channel Four's "Tony Blair on Trial".

Posted by graham @ 09:08 am

Monday, June 23, 2003

Crashing Cars (Politely)

I got home today to a bit of a shock. I pulled into my drive, but unfortunately the woman behind me didn't notice me signalling, braking, and turning. With a screech of brakes she ran into the back corner of my car. I'm still a bit shaken up, although nothing much really happened. My back bumper has been pushed sideways, and repairing it is probably going to mean replacing half the panels at the back of the car. The other car suffered a broken headlight, and a little damage to the front wing. Thankfully, no one was hurt.

Everyone is being very reasonable about the whole thing. The other driver burst into tears - probably the best thing to do, as its very hard for me to be angry with a crying woman, and her boyfriend (whose car it was, and whose name the insurance is in) has been round to offer to repair the damage, or at least put the claim through on his insurance. Whether this reasonableness will last remains to be seen, but currently the incident is making me feel quite good about the world, and the people I've chosen to share a town with.

My biggest worry now is having to deal with insurance companies and garages, and how long I'll be without a car for while mine gets repaired.

Posted by graham @ 10:25 pm

Dieting

Big news with me is my attempt to lose some of my excess weight. I'm not enormously over-weight. Just a little bit round the mid-riff, and hint of a second chin. Ideally, I want to lose about two stone - that'll put me back to what I weighed when I got married.

My trouble is that I've tried all the normal diets, and I have trouble sticking to them, and don't lose much weight when I do. So I'm going with the fad, and trying the Atkins diet - the low carbohydrate one you've heard about. Whether it works I don't know - I've only been on it for one day. What I do know is that any diet where you eat cheese omlette; greek salad; and chicken and mushroom ragout with fried savoy cabbage and bacon can't be all bad.

Partly, this all just appeals to my sense of the absurd. Eating cooked breakfasts to lose weight is just ridiculous enough to work.

Posted by graham @ 10:05 pm

Lets get this site live

Back in June 2002, I registered this vanity domain. I've kept meaning to do something with it, but wanted to do a "perfect launch". Which is why nothings happened for a year...

So instead I'm going to just launch it. I've installed greymatter, a lovely little blogging program that grant suggested to me, and I'll get to post little bloggy comments as I go along. The site probably looks like hell at the moment, but I can fix that up later...

Feeling quite excited!

Posted by graham @ 09:59 pm

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