Do you remember the days before internet banking, back when having a three-wheeler made you cool? What a nightmare! You had to be out of work extra early to make it to the bank, and even if you did there was no guarantee that you wouldn’t have to queue for ages–(that was, if you made it to the bank at all; those three wheelers weren’t exactly known for their reliability, it has to be said…)

But internet banking changed all that. Suddenly you could lay in bed and do all that and you didn’t even have to talk to anyone!

Now, while monitoring our money has become much easier to do, monitoring our energy usage is still stuck in the dark ages. For many, that is. A few people know the secret that resides at this web address: http://www.enigin.tv/

It is energy monitoring done the easy way, using an invention that can really save you money.

Come on now, watch the video; it’s something that everyone should get in on. It truly is something that can change your life and the way you live it.

I don’t know much about Enigin, but what I do know from their TV blog (not to mention money blog and marketing blog, just to name two) is that these people aren’t just in it for the money. OK, so money is definitely a motivation, but if you wanted to make money there are lots of other easier ways to do it. What I am saying is this: you could do far worse than check out all these videos. Who knows, if you tell your boss then he or she may even be so happy with their energy saving that you get a pay rise!

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“Please don’t laugh, dear diary: I am a slightly chubby person. That’s right. I fall somewhere between being thin and fat. There is no name for what I am. In the world I feel like a non-entity. Someone there only for others to laugh at.”

OK, that is an excerpt from my diary on a particularly depressing day when I was considering getting some Cheap Liposuction. I don’t feel like that all the time, thankfully. But I think I have a point: if you are average thin then fine. If you are average over-weight (so that as soon as someone meets you they know you are overweight and deal with it then) then fine. If you have a barrel chest then at least you have a kind of imposing figure which you can use to intimidate people you don’t like, or your boss. But if you just have a bit of a belly which is hidden in secret for most of the year then…well…it’s only trouble, there is no way out. (Apart from exercise: have you ever wondered why exercise and exorcism sound similar?)

My problem is that facially, I look like an average skinny-ish man. But as soon as the T-shirt weather comes upon us, the stomach bulge comes forth. That’s when I know people notice. For the first time they look at me and think I never knew he was a slightly chubby one. All this time he’s been pretending to be one of us and he never was, the cheat!

So my intention now is to feed myself up. I intend to permeate the upper echelons of overweight-ness. Before this year is out I will get myself barrel-chested and I will prevail.

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We usually played at night – mainly because this was the time when Mum was busy and Dad said he didn’t want a woman interrupting his game. Fair enough, I thought. Because of this, it was utterly silent when we took to the battle-ground, and the funniest thing about that was the squawking from outside.

Every time Dad went for a certain shot, you see – one which involved the cue going out of the shed and in to the bush behind it – there would be a loud “sqwuarkkkkkk!” followed by a violent rustling sound. This went on for months, until one day something else happened.

“Something’s grabbed the damn cue!” yelled Dad. The shed was small, and he didn’t need to yell, so I knew it was something serious.

I rushed around to help him wrestle it.

“What the hell?” he said, fighting the unknown enemy. “There’s a wild animal outside!”

I ran outside to chase the tiger / bear / wild boar away.

Only I found a fox standing on its hind-legs, the cue in its teeth, wild fury in its eyes.

“You fox!” I shouted, and that was when I saw the blackbirds.

They were just above where the fox had been standing – it had by then run off – and it appeared the fox was protecting their nest. Which Dad had partially destroyed by many repeated jabbings.

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It is very distracting and quite annoying to stare at a turn signal flashing while you are driving behind them on the road. I think that this could be resolved if automakers would put a really loud dinging noise on the turn signal. Then people would not forget about it and leave it on by accident. I know in the past that there was a really light noise to let people know that it was on but this can easily be drowned out by the radio. I know that it really seems like a small thing to be upset about but it can cause an accident.

For example if you leave your right turn signal on and forget about it the person behind you assumes that you are not turning right. After driving with it on for awhile you decide to change lanes to the right. You reach to flip on the right turn signal it is already on and you start to merge. The person behind you merges at the same time and speeds up. That could be the beginning of a very bad day and a bad accident. All of this could be avoided by your turn signal making a noise that the radio does not drown out. That way even if you are forgetful it will be able to remind you and could save you from an accident.

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Moaning people, they should be quiet, shouldn’t they! They should shut up! They are as boring as sorting out Caravan insurance and everything wrong about the UK, everything negative! Thinking about it, they should be taxed. Yes, let’s tax every moaning thing they say and then see how they like it! We’d be out of debt in about ten minutes flat!

Come on now, nobody thinks that moaners are bad, do they? (Although I do strongly believe that if we taxed moaners then we’d be instantly out of debt…) The truth is very different: everyone loves a good moaner. Listening to them is addictive.

For me, nothing cures my bad mood better than sitting behind a moaner on the bus. It’s just magical–The more negative they get, the happier about my own life I become. And if you get a really experienced moaner, well, then, you my friend are in luck.

As everyone knows, there are different kinds of moaners, and different degrees of quality: you have the amateurs who don’t know how to get their point across, the ones who get in such a huff that they threaten to spontaneously combust, and, finally, the professional moaners who make it their life’s work to moan about anything and everything, no matter how small. That’s why I believe moaning should be taught at school…we just seem to have a natural talent for it and why should we waste it? In fact, If I was in charge then I’d have a world moaning championships. I’d like to see the other countries beat us at that!

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The human body is a marvel; if you want to improve on it then you can even go for Ear correction or whatever-bit(s)-of-you-requires-it enhancement. If you’re reading this (and you must be, mustn’t you?) then you know as well as I do how fantastic the human body really is. First there are physical things you can do, then there are the many things your brain can manage…One of the best being allowing you to day-dream about being on some tropical island, when really you’re cooped up in a tiny office in Slough. Considering everything that’s going on under our skin, it’s a miracle that we can walk in a straight line without something breaking or something else falling off.

Which is why it annoys me when people moan about what their body can’t do. Think about it: you can breathe, and eat, and run, and jump…What else do you really need to be able to do?! Top of the list would be “I can’t eat twenty chocolate bars without putting on weight” and just beneath it would be “My body’s useless! I can’t even run to the shops!” But what people forget is this: the body is capable of a miraculous number of feats, it just needs some help along the way to make those things happen.

It isn’t really these peoples'faults for moaning, of course. Most people haven’t been ill enough that they know how it really is to have everything taken away from them. So next time you see someone who’s worse off, remember: take advantage of what you have, because you only get one shot at this (probably…)

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I hate maps. I will always hate maps. As long as there are maps in the world that exist only to torment the people of this world, I will hate maps with a vengeance!

I can’t really see how the most stupid invention in the world—the maddening and ludicrous ‘folding map which can not be folded back up again without taking time off work and the help of an experienced psychologist—came to be. At one point in time, presumably in the early stages of R & D, there must have been enough people in one room to put their heads together and say “you know what Steve? This idea really sucks, and you want to know why?”

“I think I already know why–” Steve might say.

And there we have it. The plan to saturate the world with difficult-to-fold-back-up, crap-to-hold-in-the-wind-while-lost maps would have been ditched there and then. Steve would probably have lost his job and gone on to do another less taxing job (anything else I would imagine), and the world would instead have been saturated with easy-to-fold-excellent-to-read-while-lost maps.

Except Steve (or whoever it was, it may have been Margerie or Jill) went on to have head-scratchingly immense success, and the folding map became a main-stay, a part-player in divorces, no doubt, and the collapse of a large number of countries. If only things would have been different! There would have been less depression in the world, less fights at the wheel which ended up in tragedy, and more smiles all round. Sometimes folding maps get me really mad and I just have to vent–

The one benefit of hating maps is this: I have grown so used to hating them that the practice of pouring my heart and soul in to this somewhat negative activity is quite cathartic. I need to hate maps, you see. It makes the rest of everything I do seem magical and great, even if it’s cleaning the toilet!

Finally, I need to have a little bit of a gloat. I have just bought the most gratifying mizuno running shoes that I have ever owned. Parks Marathon, here I come!

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T-shirts used to say “I Feel Good” or “I Love Great Britain” but now they say things like “I am the sexiest angel alive” and “HOT STUFF”. What happened? When did we get so desperate to tell the world what we think we are? I just find it very weird and a bit wrong. I think it should be up to other people to decide if a passerby is hot stuff or sexy of an angel. I just don’t like having it thrust all up in my face. It just doesn’t feel right! You may as well just have a t-shirt saying, ’My appointment at Botox Manchester is at 9am on a Monday’.

The worst thing is that there doesn’t seem to be any law or ruling against this kind of awful, distasteful visual pollution. If there was I am reasonably certain that about 80% of the population would be immediately up in court and some people would be going away for a very long time indeed–

What about the future of T-shirts? Who knows where it’ll go. We’ve already had the whole long T-shirt thing, which just seems odd, so I can’t even hazard a guess as to where it will go. I just hope it doesn’t involve more of the dodgy same.

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I’m a big fan of Portishead, so when I heard about the new side project by Geoff Barrow I was obviously very interested.

His transient group, ‘Beak’ was formed with the help of two other musicians; Matt Williams (from Team Brick) and Billy Fuller (Fuzz against Junk). The whole idea behind the new band was to create an album that worked in the complete opposite way to Portishead. Instead of spending weeks on end trying to perfect each track, Beak would be all about spontaneity and musical improvisation. True to this new philosophy, Beak’s debut album was recorded in one live session. There is no additional fluff or remixing; what they played in the studio that day is exactly what you hear on the CD.

But does it actually work as a whole? Well, these three guys are undoubtedly very talented and recording twelve tracks straight off is no mean feat. However, the overall result is patchy. Looking at it in terms of what they set out to do, they deserve a round of applause. Although I don’t really go in for improvised music as a rule…

Hearing Beak has made me realise just how much I love the polished sound of Portishead’s music. Okay, so they are well-known for being perfectionists who constantly put off their release dates; but when they finally do reveal a new album, it is always well worth the wait.

For me, there are only four or five good tracks on Beak’s CD. I hate to say this, but at times their Kraut Rock style teeters dangerously on the edge of pretentious twaddle. It is all a bit too much of a muchness and makes you wonder if they really did tax their song-writing skills very much at all.

Beak is an interesting little project for Geoff Barrow to mess around with and he probably enjoyed doing something different. But I am personally far more interested in his input into the next (strongly rumoured) Portishead release.

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“But making tea is easy!” I hear you cry. “This is all a bit over the top”. And maybe you’re right, maybe it is. But at the same time there is so much bad tea being made on a daily basis that it’s a problem we cannot just simply ignore any longer. I have a scientist friend who has worked out all the statistics and he has advised me that in ten years, if the current trend is kept up, the world (or at least UK) may become so disillusioned with tea that they decide to completely give it up.

We can’t risk that happening!

But also, I’m not holding my breath on a nation-wide tea-instructing initiative. Not because it’s a ridiculous idea, but because, as everyone knows, the proudest tea maker keeps his technique to him / herself.

What I am about to bequeath to you breaks nearly all the unwritten rules of tea making this side of the val thorens ski resort. Here are the secrets. Just know to always keep an eye over your shoulder as you read this.

1) Pour boiling water in slowly.

2) Press tea-bag up against side repeatedly. Do this for at least five minutes.

3) Be careful when applying milk. Too much and you’ll be done for. Too little and you may blow your own face off.

4) Stir slowly and drink while hot.

Be careful–walls have ears.

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