Useful PDF guide to the polite amount to tip in various countries is here. (Via a discussion at Word of Mouth).
Blog
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The Bell Hotel, New Alresford
A dinner stop on the way back from Basingstoke at the Bell Hotel in the pretty town of New Alresford in Hampshire. Very friendly service on a quiet Sunday evening and OK food. Steak was nicely presented with good accompaniments, but was a very English medium. Tom had kid-sized cod and chips which looked properly prepared. Desserts: a bland chocolate pudding for me but a much better apple crumble and ice cream for the little one.
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Web 2.0: digital Maoism
Bloggers come in for a bit of French stick in a series of articles at Le Monde. Apparently:
Nous sommes victimes de “la résurgence d’une idée selon laquelle le collectif est le summum de la sagesse”.
and a lot worse besides.
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The rubber pierogi circuit
Ken Livingstone has been wooing London’s Polish community ahead of the elections next year, according to the Guardian. I may not be a Polish citizen (though it might come in handy if UKIP ever take over), but I’d think about voting for a man who offered pierogi.
Candidates in Brighton (Pavilion), take note.
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Military co-ordination
Interesting article in the Age, in which the former Australian PM Malcolm Fraser suggests that Canberra should never commit troops to a US-led mission unless (as happened with Britain in WWII) a senior Australian Minister can be resident in Washington DC and a member of the war cabinet.
Not a bad idea for us, either, seeing what’s happened in Iraq.
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If it had been a fish it could have been battery
The most startling thing about this story – where a 12-year-old was arrested for chucking a sausage at an old gent in a restaurant – is this line from his mum:
“[Being arrested] had quite a bit of an effect on him. He couldn’t sleep. He takes sleeping tablets anyway – but they didn’t work.”
Now I don’t want to be all Daily Mail here, but SLEEPING TABLETS? At 12? He may have more problems than occasional rowdy behaviour around pork products.
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China not going to screw US. Yet
Salon debunks today’s Telegraph panic-piece by noted hysteriac Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, where it is claimed that the Chinese government are about to dump the greenback, causing the US economy serious problems.
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I am not a hedgehog. Am I?
Is it true, as Wikipedia reports (possibly from this source), that people from Hertfordshire are nicknamed ‘Haycocks’ or ‘Hedgehogs’ in the same way that people from Yorkshire are ‘Tykes’?
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August in Whitehall
It’s a sunny day in August, and things are very quiet at the ICA, normally the alternative staff canteen for Whitehall mandarins.