Concrete Achievements

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  • Travel notes: Belfast (1)

    To Belfast for the wedding of Niamh Rooney and Bill Stewart. The wedding – and the city – is very friendly and welcoming. The city is still a little shabby and beaten up in places, but thankfully the bride and groom are not.

    We stayed at the Crescent Townhouse, off Botanic Avenue, which is an unpretentious boutique hotel, if there is such a thing. The staff were very, very friendly and only occasionally inefficient – I’m still disappointed at not getting toast at breakfast on Saturday, almost as much as at the unrequested 0630 wake-up call.

    Wandered around the shops on Saturday morning before taking the inevitable bus tour, which covered the murals on the Falls and Shankhill Roads as well as the more usual docks, city hall, etc. Saturday afternoon, we went out and about with Colin, a friend of Bill.

    We started with an adequate coffee at the trendy but faintly annoying bar Apartment (Donegall Square West), and took a stroll round the City Hall. City Hall – rather OTT, and resembling the offspring of Leeds City Hall and Saint Paul’s Cathedral – is celebrating its 100th anniversary, and has an exhibition of its history which is almost interesting, but is horrendously let down by being entirely phrased in the first person (my city, my mayor, etc.). This might work for three years olds but doesn’t work for me – just reminds me of the My Computer icons and similar ghastliness.

    We then headed down to the Ulster Museum. It’s a good museum, but it has bizarre opening times (only afternoons at weekends, but all day during the week?). Finally, out into the country for a stroll around Giant’s Ring, a fortification on the edge of Lisburn.

  • Redirection

    Movie posters reimagined at b3ta.com.

  • EU III

    Oh goodness me! Paradox Interactive have announced Europa Universalis III. Let joy be unconfined! Let time wasted be infinite!

  • Travel notes: Chelmsford

    To Chelmsford for a meeting this afternoon, and lunch in the Acanteen cafe on New London Road (address). A nice stripped-wood cafe, with a good range of sandwiches and drinks. Didn’t try the coffee, but the ambience was very good. A scrambled egg on toast was OK, but a bit bland and accompanied by rather tough sausages. My host’s chicken soup looked better.

  • Football, a how-to guide

    A guide to following football for Americans.

  • Who cares most?

    Scott Adams – Dilbert’s creator – has an amusing suggestion on his blog. It is that, in relationships, and perhaps in life, decisions should always be left to the person who cares most about them. Thus marital disagreements will be avoided and wives those who care most will be left secure in their superiority. Adams adds:

    Many women and some men who read this blog will sharply disagree with my gross generalization. To you I say with all sincerity, “You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  • Prince Sakharov

    I’ve been refraining from commenting on the sad story of the noted dissident Prince Charles, still held under palace arrest by Chairman Blair’s brutal moderno-realist junta. When will the world speak up in favour of absolutism and hereditary privilege against these brutal elected politicians?

    OK, sarcasm over. Charles, who seems more pathetic from day to day, has placed a story with the papers that says he will refrain from public comment on contentious issues when (if) he becomes King. Of course that doesn’t mean he’ll actually understand his role as the powerless figurehead of an ossified hereditary system. For starters,

    the Prince will keep circulating journals of his thoughts to a close group of friends

    even though a free Blogger account would surely save a few trees.

    Second, and more disturbingly for fans of democracy,

    he will not need to write to ministers because he will see the Prime Minister every week and be able to make his views known then.

    Just like he does now, in fact.

    Final point on this depressing story. According a senior Clarence House source, quoted in the Observer, no-one can tell whether Charles’s views are left or right. That at least is right, because if you showed me a royalist and a member of the landed aristocracy, who was a strong supporter of tradition, hated modern architecture and intensive farming, was deeply suspicious of foreigners, supported fox hunting and thought that people should just know their place, I would be absolutely unable to say whether their views were right wing or not.

    Oh, donations to the slightly loopy Republic campaign can be made here.

  • John Lewis Partnership

    The John Lewis Partnership – presumably because they don’t have shareholders, and therefore don’t care about quarterly results announcements – publish weekly sales figures for both John Lewis and Waitrose.

  • GoMetric

    The Irish have a good website left over from when they went metric on their road signs. Now there are calls for the UK to do the same, but obviously it would be the end of the world, the nation would collapse, no-one in the country can understand kilometres even though they’ve been taught in schools for forty years, our masters in Brussels etc.

    Whatever. Maybe I should just move to Ireland. Their paranoid wing doesn’t appear to be in control.

  • Shrine bombings

    (NYT) Blast Destroys Golden Dome of Sacred Shiite Shrine in Iraq:

    The shrine housed the tombs of two revered leaders of Shiite Islam and symbolized the place where the Imam Mahdi, a mythical, messianic figure, disappeared from this earth. Believers in the imam say he will return when the apocalypse is near, to cleanse the world of its evils.

    Does this sound like anyone we know? The NYT’s straight-faced approach to this ‘mythical figure’ made me smile.