Don’t you just love an apocryphal tale? When it comes to the origin of popular sayings, you can hardly move for them. This week brought the first sighting of a newt in my garden pond. It’s always an exciting moment when something other than a cat or a bird happens across my natural habitat but there was something particularly poignant about the arrival of this newt, coming as it did at a time of national fixation with getting back to the pub. (more…)

There aren’t many TV ads that move me these days, other than to throw a brick at the telly, of course, but one that always makes me smile is Snoop Dogg’s Just Eat commercial. For the first time possibly since mash got Smash, here’s an ad that’s got style, humour and poetry. (more…)

To sing or not to sing? That is the question. And for 60% of us, the answer is “not to sing”. Why? Because we can’t. (more…)

If you were a potato (and that’s a big ‘if’), how would you want to be cooked? This question cropped up today in one of those high-level strategic planning meetings and I have to say I’m still struggling to decide. (more…)

There’s a word I like to use now and then. A gorgeous word, rhythmic, musical, redolent of Aegean islands and summer breezes and mushrooms and the marvellous randomness of life. (more…)

Thirty years and a month prior to our eventual exit from the EU, engineers from Britain and France were basking in the satisfied glow of having joined hands 75m below the seabed, somewhere around the middle of the English Channel, or La Manche, depending on which side you were drilling from.

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Isn’t cardboard brilliant! Strong, pliable, lightweight, biodegradable, tactile and aesthetically pleasing. It even sounds good when you slide one piece over another. All these attributes add up to what online retailers call ‘the unboxing experience’ – the pleasure of opening a cardboard box. (more…)

Are you a sponge or a stone? Do you like to experience all facets of life? Or do you shut yourself off from new experience?

Fans of Withnail and I will immediately recognise these lines as Uncle Monty’s roundabout proposition to the terrified Marwood, to which Marwood replies in desperation, “I voted Conservative!” There’s something in the way Richard Griffiths says “sponge” that gives this most primitive of multicellular organisms a salacious quality that would probably surprise it if it knew. Most sponges are, after all, hermaphrodites. (more…)

Moving your business’ IT systems to the cloud offers a number of benefits, such as flexibility when it comes to upgrading, easy scalability and the cost-effectiveness of a model whereby you only pay for what you use. But the actual migration process is not something to be taken lightly. (more…)

We’ve been familiar with the concept of drones for some years now. Their use in the military, for everything from bomb disposal to surgical strikes, is no longer the stuff of sci-fi, their recreational use (and misuse) by consumers and criminals makes the news headlines with increasing frequency and we’re all still waiting for our first drone delivery from Amazon. (more…)