Blogs

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering In yesterday’s least surprising news, the worst performing sector of the construction industry, according to the S&P Construction PMI, is housebuilding. Output in this sector has fallen for the third month in a row, and …

What’s the use of doing a kindness, if you do it a day too late. Customer service. How hard is it to just do the right thing by customers? I have a couple of stories to share on the topic. Two annoyingly rubbish service ones, and one, well, where they …

You can never plan the future by the past Depending on your point of view, you can get media validation for whatever you believe if you look hard enough and choose the right paper/website/radio show. A quick type of the sentence “Rayner planning reform December 2024” into the search string …

For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack It’s that time of year when a not-so-young merchant and supplier’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of friendship, loyalty, camaraderie, networking. What I sometimes refer in my head to as the Going …

No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be? Maybe we’re missing something. Maybe Chancellor Rachel Reeves …

Condescension is the language of fools We live in an increasingly global world. What happens overseas affects us in the UK, and vice versa, to a greater or lesser extent. Which is why, even though it could be said to be none of my actual business, I spend a lot …

All life long, the same questions, the same answers. Smile, they said, for things can always get worse. So they smiled, and low and behold, things got worse. I’m not, as it happens, talking about the news from across the Atlantic this morning. That I can’t deal with right now. …

A great while ago, the world began With hey, ho, the wind and the rain I’ve sounded off a lot in this blog about the dire state of our water industry in the UK, and the parlous state of affairs that privatisation of the sector has left us with. Then …

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance We’ve become so reliant upon technology: our phones, our laptops, our emails that when we suddenly can’t use them, we feel bereft. Adrift and rudderless in a sea of information that we can’t access because our servers are down. We saw what happened …

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality A quick trip down memory lane into Year 8 Science. Bear with me reader. When you drop a stone into a pond, how far the ripples last, how far they go, and how ,well, rippley …