Welcome to my online home.  I recently read a professional copywriter, advising against reliance upon such a lazy, insincere cliché on your homepage.  I guess it’s all about context, though.  Do I really feel that even the nice people at John Lewis are genuinely thrilled if they ever welcome me to their site or is it simply as reflexive as being told to “have a nice day” by an inattentive New Yorker?

I really tried to take the advice but realised I’m just too well-mannered not to welcome visitors into my abode.  I guess that makes me sincere, which makes it okay not to comply, right?

Anyway, you’re very welcome, wherever you are!

What’s new?

In recent weeks, we were sad to say goodbye to Ben, my brother’s faithful border collie.  He was 12 and had a great life.  You can read his obituary here.

Our local pub has had a rough trot, earlier this month and I was keen to do my bit to join others in encouraging custom their way as they trade their way out of the (alleged) mess they were left in.  Here’s a blogpost explaining why you should go there more often.

I’m working on a few freelance articles, as usual, but for one of my assignments, I needed to become a Wikipedia editor.  The process of ‘ordination’ was much simpler than I’d expected and I now have the power to change annoying errors on the world’s most popular encyclopaedia!  I must now exercise great responsibility to go with this great power, as Peter Parker’s wise Uncle Ben once advised.   I first exercised my awesome new power on updating and extending the CSG page – but I have to admit to a couple of much-needed extra-curricular amends!

Finally, it’s sad to see Flickr being ‘monetised’ and I’m rather reluctant to pay it the £50 a year just to act as an off-site backup of 7,000 of my most significant images.  Consequently, they’ll delete the oldest 6,000 of them, which means my use and regard of the platform has diminished greatly, despite the fact my account – and links to it from this site – are still active….for now….