These were the three thoughts that went through my mind when I read the following in a news report about Raoul Moat’s funeral in today’s Metro newspaper: One stranger was Theresa Bystram, 45, who travelled 480km (300 miles) from Weybridge, Surrey, on an overnight coach with three of her teenage sons to be at the [...]

Okay, I do at this point need to declare an interest. I’m an Apple fanboy. Not only have I got an iPad, an iPhone, a MacBook, and a MacBook Air, I have also in the past owned an iBook, a first-generation iMac, and even [drumroll please] a Newton. (Buying a Mustang or a Mondeo, say, [...]

Labour party supporters (not necessarily the Labour party itself) are currently slamming away at the Lib Dems for talking to the Tories about some sort of coalition, totally ignoring the fact that it wasn’t the Lib Dems who took this decision, but the British people themselves when a hell of a lot more of them [...]

Let’s talk about a small, remote, poor, and undeveloped country called Oxfordia that recently held an election. Oxfordia has a simple “first-past-the-post” election system; the country is divided into two halves, each of which returns a member of parliament. The results of the election were as follows: East Oxfordia Labourious Party: 21,938 votes (42.5%) The [...]

It’s no secret that the Lib Dems are doing better right now than they have since the early 80s heyday of the SDP, nor that the Tories and their friends in the press have gone into serious and sustained brick production as a result – something neatly demonstrated by the picture to the right of [...]

The BBC have put up an election calculator, where you can plug in various hypothetical national votes shares for the parties and then see what the election result would be, assuming consistent swings. You can find it here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8609989.stm I had a play around, and managed to come up with an interesting scenario. Imagine you had the [...]

It’s just been announced that the London Evening Standard is to become a free paper (at present it’s 50p) and will most likely merge with it’s already free London Lite sibling. Now I have a number of issues about this, not least of which is that I like the Evening Standard and generally buy it [...]

I’m not a fan of Margaret Thatcher by any means. Hell, while back in the 1980s my teen-aged self might not have considered her to be the Antichrist, I probably would have figured her as the Antichrist’s John the Baptist. Now, whilst still disagreeing (sometimes quite violently) with the probably the majority of what she [...]

I read an article in the Guardian the other day about the introduction of CCTV cameras that got me thinking. In March this year, Sam Goodman, 18, walked out of his politics lesson to protest against four CCTV cameras that had been installed overnight in the classroom. He was joined by all but one of [...]

By friend Brian has, in comments to my previous post, pointed me at a very interesting article that puts the case for Denis Walsh, the midwife who caused something of a stir by apparently suggesting that pain in childbirth is a good thing. It is true that we’re all basing our opinions on newspapers’ intrepretations [...]