Neil Oliver
Last week I was out with my muse and we attended Neil Oliver’s lecture tour in which he talks about his new book The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places. (Smiley face) Apart from the fact that he’s a historian, and a top bloke to boot, what was interesting was...
Telephones as tools of social isolation
I don’t visit my friends any more. When I were a lad we used to have callers. We had a living room with the TV and the coal fire, it was somewhere to live and entertain. When people arrived, the TV would be turned off and the kettle would be turned on. Years ago,...
Scary Hatching
This post is copied from the crowd funding page for In SatNav We Trust. Please visit, pledge and spread the word to support the book. Good day again supporters. (Smiley face) I promised I’d post another update with an extract for people who aren’t yet supporters. If...
The One Percent
This post is copied from the crowd funding page for In SatNav We Trust. Please visit to support the book. Okay so the first day is done and we’re on target at 1%. I say the first day, the page has been live since the beginning of September but we’ve been...
Has GDPR ruined the Internet?
You clicked on that link on Facebook, you know that link, possibly clickbait but you wanted to see for yourself, after all it’s only a picture of an old shoe dug up from Roman times. But you don’t get the world’s most interesting shoe, you get a brief, tempting flash...
In SatNav We Trust – A search for meaning through the historic counties of England
Those of you in the know, and you know who you are, will be aware that I’ve recently been in talks with a new publisher for my travelogue. I’ve been holding back, apart from the occasional post about progress, because the title wasn’t formally agreed and there were...
Moondog – if you’re out there get your people in touch!
I’m in music hell! There was a guy who lived in New York in the fifties and sixties called Moondog. He was a street performer and composer, a busker I guess. He was blind, at one time homeless although he later had a country retreat, but he made his money by selling...
Major Tim doesn’t not believe in God, or does…
Tim Peake was on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning answering the question of, “Was the universe designed by a higher intelligence?” This was the way the question was posed to Britain’s latest astronaut by the BBC’s Justin Webb. Tim Peak’s Soyuz capsule is...
The first feedback from my new publisher
I've been reviewing the document from my new publisher that outlines the publishing plan for #InSatNavWeTrust. This is the first time I've seen anything from them that describes the book at they see it. Here's how they've described it in their synopsis: A...
R2D2 has been having a tantrum and, frankly, I’ve had enough
There’s been a bit of an incident with R2D2 recently. He’d been unaware that there had been another Star Wars film, only really paying attention at the run up to Christmas when he’s become accustomed to being taken out on a few expeditions in preparation for his...
Things are getting serious
Since my visit to a publisher a few weeks ago (no names, no pack drill) things have been moving along nicely. They are in the process of costing In SatNav We Trust and working out stuff to do with numbers, I guess numbers of pages, numbers of copies, numbers of...
Publishers, pubs, canals and hops
Today I had a great meeting with a new publisher. (I also had a nice steak and a pint in a proper London pub, nearly ended up in the canal because of a cyclist but you have to read to the end to see where that fits in.) Those of you in the know, and you know who you...
Scotland Sightseeing 2018 Awards
Before we set off on the Scotland Tour at the beginning of May I had the thought of writing a travel blog each day as I did when I went on my travelogue tour some years ago. That idea turned out to be a little ambitious when it was pointed out that I didn’t want to...
If I make a threat, I carry it out… I’m bad-ass!
So, I decided to eschew teabags what with the discovery of plastic in the paper of just about every teabag in the world. (Was it always thus?) I tweeted Yorkshire Tea to blackmail them with a public threat to desert them if they didn't remove the plastic forthwith. Of...
Are IT professionals guilty of magical thinking?
In my coming travelogue (too long in the pipeline) I discuss two ways of looking at and dealing with the world, that I describe as rational and irrational approaches. The irrational approach is often described as magical thinking. Wikipedia defines magical thinking as...
The fall of the Berlin Wall and how not to write about it
They are saying that as of today, 06 February 2018, the Berlin wall has been down one day longer than it stood, or something like that because I'm not checking the figures. I grew up with the Berlin Wall, having been born in 1963. I thought of it as a permanent...
The Last Jedi inspires R2D2 to hold the fort over the holiday
I’ve been away you know. You may not know, other than the lack of posts over the last couple of weeks, but I’ve been in Amsterdam with friends for New Year where we played murder mystery and I played Enrico the farm hand with an outrageous west country accent and many...
R2D2 Helped me wrap the presents and put up the tree
After R2D2 redeemed himself on Sunday by helping out with the filming of my promo video for the travelogue, and not stealing anything technical to give to C3PO, I decided to give him a bit of reward. So tonight we sat down and, in preparation for watching The Last...
Third time lucky with Oxford filmmakers
At the last update on the status of the Travelogue promo video I said I’d stumbled across another filmmaker. A nice bloke called Miguel from Portugal who’s studying film at Oxford Brookes University and, it seems, he’s come up trumps. Oh, hang on, we used to play...
Now R2D2 is really pissed off with me
Yesterday I promised R2D2 that he could come out to lunch with me and my IT support mates. He’s been keen to get out to see The Last Jedi and he was really looking forward to meeting up with the techies to get some geek to geek time in. Some of them went to see the...
It’s that time of year again
R2D2 is a bit pissed off at me lately. He knows it’s coming up to time for his regular trip out to a Star Wars film and he’s heard all the fuss about The Last Jedi so he’s keen to get out there to see it. To be honest he's been grumpy as fuck. Unfortunately, I’ve been...
In film-makers we trust
So, my old friend had a video camera. We were on a weekend away and just happened to be in Whitby, one of the locations from the Travelogue and I have all sorts of theories of where Bram Stoker actually wrote Dracula. Anyway, while I was in Whitby my phone rang and it...
Local council to chop down Hogwarts Forbidden Forest …or something
News came in recently of a tragedy about to befall residents of Hogwarts Well not Hogwarts exactly, but... Hemel Hempstead It starts with H and it’s not far from the Barrow residence, so it's the best I could do. A footpath through Hemel Hempstead, that is said...
What I’m supposed to be doing this year
So it’s, yet again, ages since I’ve written an update of my activity, but, truth be known, I’ve been rushed off my feet. In the past month or so I’ve seen out the end of the festival season where I wore a caftan and a silly hat (nobody commented much to my...
Travelogue news
The last blog news was that I spent a day filming for the travelogue promo video. Since then things have slowed down to an almost complete stop. About a month after the filming was finished I had a message from the filmers saying that they wouldn’t have time to do the...
A jolly day’s filming
Up at 5am today for the grand making of the promotional video for In SatNav We Trust. This has been a long time coming. Last year I pretty much decided to go down the crowd funding route through Kickstarter or Unbound. I’ve yet to decide. So an hour after getting up I...
All sorts of jiggery pokery
So we are inching slowly closer to filming the promo video for In SatNav we Trust. It’s turned into an administrative nightmare so much so that I can’t remember if I already posted a blog to say all this. million In short we need to get a permit to film in Oxford and...
An open letter to Microsoft
I gave Edge a try a few weeks ago and found it wouldn't do many of the things I used to do with IE, Firefox and other browsers. Notably you've taken away the favourites bar which features in every other browser I know. sod Then, after I've decided to look for an...
Is Donald Trump working with Disney?
Is Donald Trump in league with the Disney Corporation? Is Trump more than a buffoon in the mould of modern politicians such as Boris Johnson, or are people like him all just idiots who have climbed to the top by virtue of fart-arsery and rich parents. Is Donald Trump...
Memories of Steve Wilson
Back in the early nineties, when I was too shy to speak up for myself, I had a go at producing a magazine that we called The Philosopher's Stone. Having been to one or two Talking Stick events at the Black Horse in London some years before I had the idea of taking the...