I think the BBC and ITV have managed to come together and decide that we no longer require anything decent in terms of comedy entertainment. ITV3 have been running a series called "Beyond a Joke" which I have managed to see what I would like to say was a "number of episodes".



Unfortunately, having watched several seconds of the show I relented and switched off. I couldn't stand watching the comedians talking about the past and over analysing things, and to be fair, it bored me a little. Although I am almost certain that this was most certainly a fantastic programme which spoke really well about how comedy on tv in Britain reflected actual life at the close of the 20th century.

But unfortunately, I don't know whether it did or not, and I didn't really care that much either.

What I had noticed, though, was that there was an immense amount of shite TV on TV. Including the aforementioned Reggie Perrin, and many other things.

Although I have spotted some decent coming ups, on the BBC, which I will be talking about at some point - there's just nothing on at the moment, and so I have resorted to buying a book.

Oh yes, dear readers. I'm reading! It's quite weird.

And not only am I reading, I've actually *purchased* two books from Amazon over the past few weeks. Something inside me is wondering why I am reading and why I've started, but I've managed to shove coffee beans down his throat and he's shut up now - so I'm able to answer this question with the sound of choking and a little bit of vomit.

Almost a Philipa moment.

But Dawn French - Dear Fatty is nearing the end of its 365 page greatness and I shall shortly be coming here to talk about it. Behind the times? Me? No! Books are new things aren't they? New media is the answer. Yes.

Nic x

Living on £20 is a challenge, I can tell you. So, my total spending so far this week? Let's have a look!

Friday
As soon as I got up this morning, I logged onto online banking and transferred all but £22 out of my current account into an account that doesn't have a card or cheque book. Paid slightly more than I was expecting, which made me smile.
I needed some lunch for work - and went to Tesco for this, I spent a total of £1.12 on some bread and also some chicken slices to fill it - butter can be had at work for free!

Saturday
Managed to go all day without spending any money at all - continuing to use the lunch for work that I'd bought before. Should be able to keep this up until the end of Monday. Into the evening, and I craved chocolate - so I went to Tesco and spent a huge £2.50 on two bags of Cadbury's Clusters.

Good thing about using Tesco for all of my purchases is that as well as spending as little as possible I am also collecting club card points meaning that I get free money in the future!

Easier than I thought. More tomorrow ;)

According to someone, someone else used to manage to live on £20 - with £7 of that going straight away on a bus pass, and with the rest of it being spent to buy an ostrich at the end of the week.

So, as part of my attempts to get rid of all forms of debt prior to going to university and building up far bigger ones, I present to you the answer to every single one of your problems. Living on £20 a week.

And the journey starts today. I will be carrying around with me only two £10 notes. These £10 notes will have to last me the entire week - with a couple of exceptions because of ... Kind of...things I have to spend.

Aside from the £20, I am allowed to put £20 of petrol in the car and £11 on parking at the Kingfisher - these two spends are...completely and wholly unavoidable.

I'll let you know how things go today.

In times when ITV have no money - they produce crap reality tv shows based on a Simon Cowel format.

Blah.

At Josie's tonight, I watched an episode of Britain's Got Talent and unfortunately I happened to glance my eyes upon one of the acts. Frankly, the flashing breasts got it for me.

Give me strength to save this world.

The Daily Telegraph made a bit of a boo boo today.

http://www.markpack.org.uk/baby-p-daily-telegraph/.

All shows that maybe what we used to do with Ruberyvillage.co.uk isn't much different from how real online news websites work. Quite scary, to be honest.

(by the way - blog post later on where I've been for the past few days!!)

Nic x

Back in a long time ago, Yahoo! Bought! Out! Flickr! And! Promised! To! Make! Everything! The! Same!.

Only, like every single company that gets bought by a bigger company with a reputation - Yahoo! were clever when they made the promises and added that little "planned" or "in the forseeable future" big onto the end of their promises. Both of those, of course make promises completely worthless.



Imagine standing having a chat with your parents and promising you have "no plans" to get a tattoo. That afternoon, you go out and decide that you want a tatoo. They accuse you of lying about your intentions. But you can have a clear concious because you were correct when you said you had no plans - because, when you made the statement, you didn't.

Your parents aren't going to have any of it, and fortunately since you are their child they can smack you for it. Or lock you in your room. Yahoo! though, can't be locked into a room by its customers - and so the customers roll over and accept the change with only a few moans.



And then Yahoo! gets taken over and the customers go "Oh no, I believe them when they say they have no plans to change anything." Because they are essentially living off of the hope that they trust this company that has given them nothing but a large shafting in the past. And the process repeats itself.

So to round that off, Yahoo! broke Flickr and made it so that to sign into Flickr you had to have a Yahoo ID. As far as I'm aware, I've signed up for about 76 different Yahoo! IDs over my lifetime, and each one I have not been able to sign into because (I have presumed) I set the password to be something completely random because I was annoyed with having to create the ID, and have long since forgotten that I had set the password to "rhubarb1953" - but since I converted (I say converted, what I really mean is was forced to change) to using a Yahoo ID for Flickr, I have never been able to sign into my account without doing a helpless scream of "I've forgotten my password oh yellow master!" and receiving an email from them detailing the things.




And here's where the odd bit happens.

Each time I have done this process I have been unable to sign in - despite using the details that Yahoo themselves have just sent me to my verified email address.

They claim they're wrong. I can only sign into the account once I reset my password - and then it automatically logs me in.

Having done this and changed my password back to rhubarb1953 or something else obscure that is rated as "moderately" secure by the flashing green and red lights of hackery - I log out, and log back in again. And it works. A week later, I try and log in using exactly the same details and the world becomes a fail.

Am I doing something wrong?!

(For those of you who wondered, the pictures on this blog represent the occasional randomness of Flickr, and some of the wonderful things that are on it. essentially, I have used this post as a gratuitous example of photography.)

Imagine a chat show, based in a hybrid car which is saving the planet with each mile.

Throw in a pinch of Robert Llewellyn and a few cameras. Add a celebrity who's being driven to work by the aforementioned Llewellyn character, and you have on your hands a rather great thing. I think you should watch it, and therefore here is the blog post. I'd vlog it, but frankly I'm scared to do that.

You can watch the latest episode of car pool at www.llewtube.com , and it's released weekly.

Red Dwarf: Back To Earth is on Dave tonight at 9pm. So no, I am not late with my review - although, yes, I am, horribly late. I just wanted to give you a reminder that it's on, and give you a chance to watch it. Go on.

Another TV programme from the past that has come back into creation - although for this one, things are kind of different.



When Red Dwarf left us back in 1999, it was getting 8 million viewers and there was no real reason for it to be abandoned by BBC TWO. Simply its time had come was enough of an excuse, and BBC TWO concentrated on other areas of TV. And picked back up by Dave, Red Dwarf did not fail to disappoint many people who were simply waiting to be disappointed.

As with any show that has such a huge following - any new revival even if it's by the same people who made the original (as in this case) will be accused of destroying things. It's a worry for them that as Lister walks towards camera in the last episode of Back To Earth - this might be the last time we see him. That might be the memory that is left forever in British TV history.

And personally - I wouldn't be ashamed if it was.

The episodes suffered a little from the problem that it was being controlled by a TV company who wanted to maximise the profitability of the show coming back - and who can blame them. But from the point of view of someone watching, splitting the feature-length episode (as no-one will deny it was) into three parts for its showing over three nights was a stupid decision by whoever made it.

Indeed, the feature-length edition of Red Dwarf suffered from the same things that most shows that are intended to be 120 minutes long do - the initial part of the story (in this case, episode one) simply builds the characters - even though they are already established - and gives the viewer some basic facts.

Watching this alone, a fair few of the 1.2 million that tuned in decided it wasn't worth coming back to see parts 2 and 3, which were far superior and took Dwarf back to the original days, in a subtle and calm way - which didn't offend people who had never seen an episode before.

In a more gratifying way, the new episodes actually improved on the last 9 series by adding something which was more than often missing. After spending so many years in deep space, alone - the ship in the Back To Earth episodes is a lonely, vast, quiet place - endless corridors leading to rooms which look the same. The lack of a laughter track on the episode (although this was done for budgetary reasons) simply adds to this, and that adds to the story.

The sheer loneliness of being the only human left in the entire universe, with only a mechanoid, a hologram of someone you can't stand and the final being in the race of the cats to keep you company really has taken its toll on Lister in between when we last saw him and the Back To Earth episodes. Matured, he's now ironing. He's emotional. And most of all, he is deeply sad - he knows, deep down, that he is just going through the motions and living through his life.

And there's something about that that makes the joy-squid seem - like a nice gift for Lister.



And there's a gift in there for the fans too - he might be sad, lonely, and facing nothing but death in space - it gives Lister hope that a return to earth is possible. That he can get Kerchanski back. And that there is a reason for another series of Red Dwarf.

Overall - if you haven't already guessed - I love it.

Nic x

Never before than today have I felt more alive and happy because of a single eight digit number replacing me as a personified representation of my influence on the world.

Ahem.

I decided to beat the crowd and phoned up the accommodation office at Brighton Uni last week to find out all of the details I need to log into the application site. Despite probably being the only person who has registered yet, I feel there is some sense of urgency to completing my application, and so I will be doing this with the utmost efficiency.

Registering though, gave me an incredible sense of achievement once I had logged in. I had been given a student ID. I feel part of the Brighton crowd and I also finally - at last - feel like I am actually going to university. Which is almost scary, but wholly and fully exciting when I am currently spending so much time hating my job and where I work.



Still stands the question of what to do with the gap between now and Brighton though. But I'm sure I'll find something?

But applying for the accommodation has also got me thinking on a number of points. And I'll be blogging about those over the next few days - including the question of catered or not?! considered by some to be quite a rude question to ask - even daring not to live in the real world, while giving others the opinion that it means you're more focused. But I won't do into that now, as tempting as it is.



First of all, I am thinking about what the accommodation staff actually do all day when no one requires accommodating. Throughout most of the year, I can see they might have things to see to - such as dealing with people who drop out, arranging payments and making sure the buildings are all good and fine. But I am absolutely certain that they do not require the same number of staff in the office to do what they are doing now (arranging accommodation for over however many students it is they are doing it for) compared to what they're doing mid-February. When pretty much nothing is happening.

Maybe they take all year to build the application system they use? Who knows. I am almost certain, though, I will be thinking about it. As I'm almost certain that at least a single penny of the money paid for accommodation will go towards funding these people, and therefore I must fully understand their roles in my life.

if anyone has any idea, please do feel free to twitter me (@nicparkes) and I'll consider your suggestions with my whole brain. Or maybe just part of it. I am a man.

Nic x

Unfortunately, in this case, it might be true that prevention makes the heart grow fonder.





I am a sitcom addict. Well, more so a sitcom addict of times gone by. The kind of sitcoms that make me want to watch them aren't made any more - because they're too simple. They don't push the boundaries: they look at life and go "oh look, that's a bit silly isn't it, let's all laugh at it?"

The situations seen in comedies like Reginald Perrin, dinnerladies, and As Time Goes By, as well as countless others, are actually plausible. Almost like Dom Self talks about dreams in fiction not being realistic, in his blog on Saturday, situation comedies - defined as a humorous drama based on situations that might arise in day-to-day life - are becoming less likely to be set in situations people can relate to.

Because, despite everyone's need to escape into TV land from their horrible lives where they owe £50,000 to a bank who has no money, own a house that has an ever decreasing value, drive a car that gradually destroys the planet and work for someone they hate being paid too little, there is an ever-decreasing amount of reality in reality and so shows set in fictional situations must become more and more farcical. To the point that we are subjected to shows like Horne & Cordon where a fat guy goes and shakes his fat around and for some reason we all find it hilarious.

Today's sitcoms are 'edgy' and are nothing like the escapism into a "poke at life" that they started off as 'back in the day'.

Onto Perrin though...

Martin Clunes has been put in the role of Reginald - although obviously in this modern day he's called Reggie because it's far less formal and more modern - as apparently the modern man is still dis-satisfied with his life, despite the many changes (which the show embraces.)

Reggie's wife, although still devoted with the occasional distraction, is a career woman. The two share a car - unlike in the original where no car was present at any point (even when Reggie became rich from Grot). And on the train, instead of staring at each other in silence the anti-social iPod and people working even during their commute are there.

There are certain recurring themes from the original - but nothing of the same scale - where instead of seeing situations which are clearly not set within the linear of the programme - it is indistinguishable what Reggie has and hasn't done as he hits his boss and kisses his co-worker.



At best, Reggie Perrin is weak - with little actual development to the character of Reggie since episode one - the series is looking unlikely to make a statement. The very point of the original 3 series was the development of the character of Reginald through the endless different events which lead him to run away into the sunset and come back as someone else, re-marry his own wife and start Grot - a shop which sold useless rubbish.

The original representation of Reginald was not a despairing character who was living a real life - but one who represented not only the continuing futility of the working man's life - to repeat the same thing each day, stuck in middle management of a company he no longer cares for with no chance of anything changing - but one that also represented the future of man as a whole if things were not changed.

The recurrence of Reggie as he comes back and becomes depressed again despite being successful within Grot is a comment about life as a whole. A lot deeper than a few cheap laughs and - no matter what the producers of the show say on Points Of View - an overly enthusiastic laughter track.

At best, the show is poor. And I think it's fair to say David Nobbs didn't get where he is today by saying 'earwig' instead of 'thank you'. And indeed, by stealing the credit music inspiration and the title from the original, he hasn't only omitted to say thank you, he's also avoided saying earwig.

The Kingfisher claims it's the 11th biggest shopping centre in the UK, and has over 150 stores with almost a quarter of a million people visiting each week. But as a representative of the coffee-making element of the Kingfisher, I wonder exactly which is best. So I went to the website, where I was pleasantly surprised.

As part of trying to beat the recession, the Kingfisher are offering a prize of a grand a month to people who go online and vote for their favourite retailer in the centre.

You can join in at www.kingfishershopping.co.uk.

There are 6 shops at the Kingfisher which exclusively sell coffee and food, such as Costa do. That's Nesta, Esquires, Costa, BHS Coffee Lounge, BB's Muffins, and Muffin Break.

It's interesting for a start that anyone has bothered to log onto the website and give the coffee shops ratings. Quite often, as I'm sure many of you know, we will only receive comments from people that are negative. You only have to look on internet forums to find that many people do not say anything when they're receiving service they like - service they think is wonderful will often only receive a "yes, that's great," when people actually do come up to them and ask. And if you just 'give' people the opportunity to speak they'll only do it when there is something wrong.

Even more odd is that you would imagine a lot of the trade received by Costa and co is generated through the other businesses. If your wife goes to shop in Primark, you'll pop into Costa. If they're in Debenhams you're more likely to go to Muffin Break due to simple logistics.

And although Costa has tried to generate a certain amount of loyalty (and certainly they have succeeded in making people aware of their loyalties), within a shopping centre this is difficult to see. People often go for their nearest, rather than heading to a specific.

But it's not always the case and there are a lot of repeat customers who are very very loyal and who will keep coming back - some of them every single day. But somehow, I cannot see John - a man in his 70s who arrives at 8am every morning - logging onto the Kingfisher Shopping website and popping in his postcode, email address and selecting a rating. Certainly, he couldn't rate us on speed of service particularly accurately because there's no-one else around when he comes in.

The view of the service the regulars get is sometimes vastly different to a service someone else will receive on their first or second visit.

Regulars are, by far, more often than not, retired. The kind of people who have the time to fill out surveys on the Kingfisher website, but unfortunately many of them are also technologically challenged.

Which is why it's so odd to look at the results of the Kingfisher Best Retailer surveys. Because they not only give a positive view of the stores, but they actually give *a* view!

I would like to point out how inaccurate they are though - considering that there is no revelation of how many people voted for each score and that makes the scores NOT comparable in a true way. Because while 1 person could love the customer service in Esquires rating it 4.5/5, fifteen people may have given varying results for Costa - giving us an overall 4.5. By far, Costa is probably performing better because we are pleasing more people than we are failing.

Get it? Good. Now look at the results.

BB's Muffins, BHS Coffee Lounge, Esquires, Muffin Break Espresso, Nesta, and finally - of course - the coffee shop 7 out of 10 people prefer - Costa Coffee.

Mmmmm....

Nx

So for those of you who read via RSS, I thought I'd post a quick blog to reveal to you that I've re-developed and re-decorated the site. Don't all rush over now, though, have a picture instead.



The change is to include a new header, a simpler menu that allows for a "sub menu" for sections in the future if I need it, as well as a Blog layout which takes into account the "like" feature a lot better and makes things nicer to read. The site is also wider - allowing for pictures about 100px wider, and also a sidebar to show off my socially connected network!

Aren't I good eh?

I think the site takes into account my relatively old new slogan quite well too - Improving things slightly ;)

Nic x

So I know probably no-one cares, but this is a topic that comes up a lot: why does the BBC operate like a commercial company when it enters bidding wars with other tv stations in the uk for stuff?

This is on Digital Spy today:
Andy Duncan has hit out at the BBC for spending licence fee money on films and US programming.

The Channel 4 chief executive told the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee that the station was disappointed to be outbid on new show Harper's Island by BBC3.

Duncan said: "I don't understand why any of the licence fee is spent on acquisitions. The BBC competes against us and ITV for feature films and acquisitions, all of which would appear on British television some other way.

"If they didn't spend this money, they could spend it on original programming. There might have been a day decades ago when people went to watch a Christmas Day film on BBC1 but that has gone."

He added: "One or two things the BBC have done like The Wire and Mad Men they argue wouldn't be picked up, but a lot of the money they spend would be picked up by others.

"We are not in a position to go out and buy a major show for Channel 4. Where we could find a show that is reasonably priced, it could play a part on our digital channels."

Well, it's quite a simple answer as far as I can tell why the BBC should be allowed to do this. Because yes, the BBC are funded in the unique way that they are so that they can do things which would not be commercially successful, but if we take this same example into another area I think we can understand why this isn't always what they need to do.

County and District councils are forced to support some - what they call - socially necessary bus services. It's their job to spend tax payer's money in this way, so that people who cannot drive, or who cannot afford to, can get to places that maybe not many people need to. But these bus services, as suggested by the fact they're not commercially profitable - do not tend to get an incredible number of passengers on them. The driver gets lonely. And ultimately, the bus service receives even less attention because people never see anyone on it. People are very very very led by what they see other people doing.

And if we apply this same model to the BBC, then we'd have a completely different argument on our hands. If none of the programmes people "couldn't stand to miss" weren't allowed to be on the BBC, they'd only make the socially necessary programming and provide services such as news. No-one would watch, no-one would talk about it the next day in the office, and therefore no-one would watch. And this would repeat until the viewer-ship was so low that people decided the licence fee was not worth the social value - and it'd be pulled, the BBC privatised and eventually it would go bust.

Am I not right?

Nic x

The work that we're doing now at Simply Associates is to develop the WebWorks online resource - for kids to use the system during lunch times or at after school clubs, where teachers aren't available to actually do the teaching. It's better for the kids - because they get quality teaching, while the teachers love the fact they just have to make sure that no-one throws a computer at another person or even worse eats a biscuit over the keyboard.




In this blog, part 2 of my series of who knows how many, I'm gonna talk about what comes after the creation of the lesson objective. And this is where things get a little bit complex.

When you're creating a lesson, you put together a lesson plan - and from this lesson plan you come up with the way you'd teach the lesson. But the unique thing about this plan is that it is reasonably loose - and allows you to take the lesson where you need to in order to get the kids to understand.

When you're writing something which is not dynamic onto a VLE you have to do the job of thinking up any potential questions the kids might have, and you have to explain things a lot more clearly. So the next stage is to think of where you've got to create new content.

While doing this, you have to remember - you've already got worksheets which talk about your activities. You're replacing the teacher. In the case of our first lesson, the most difficult concept to understand is the creation of the actual page.

Although in the previous lessons we have discussed this, students repeating the activity may have forgotten - and as silly as this comment may seem - students will feel that if they look back at previous content, this may be considered "wrong."

It's important to remember that we're dealing with people who often do not think outside of the box. So even if it means duplicating content, we must be prepared to re-purpose this content in order to provide an effective teaching experience.

If you were teaching in person you wouldn't be afraid to repeat yourself, and although it feels wrong when creating a site or a book - it is very important to remember that you have to cater to people using the service rather than the "ideals."

To a certain extent, we've covered a lot of the "kids like to ask questions" element with a q&a section on the end of each lesson. But I'll talk about that later.

Nic x

Nathan provides me with inspiration for a blog.

He's wrong, of course. Just before my tank is full, it tends to be empty. But there's a reason why I vary between completely empty and full - and it stems from a deep rooted psychological problem which probably has to do with something that happened when I was a child.

I'm not trained or anything, but it's always a good guess.

"Well no, it isn't - but I always fill it up whenever I fill up cus I can't see the point in going more times than I need to."

Nathan claimed he just put £20.00 in a time, and for no real reason. And at that point I started talking and realised I had to reveal that I have a deep psychological problem. And that I lied.

Although I do see little point in putting £20.00 in at a time when you know you'll continue to use fuel - if you can afford it - there is also another reason.

I have a fear of putting £20.02, or even worse £22.01.

It's like admitting faliure - and being male, and therefore an ego covered in skin this gives me problems.

So I fill up until it clicks off.

And then I have a reason for the £33.59 it costs.

And it's not my faliure, but rather my success because I am important enough to need that much fuel, and rich enough to pay for it.

And sometimes I ask for a VAT reciept just because I don't like the person behind the counter.

Nic x

My iPod was still a g3 and it had gone through two batteries before I eventually decided I couldn't be arsed with it anymore and got rid of it. But now I've got a BlackBerry there was a very attractive feature that I had noticed but had not yet had time to play about with - it's got a standard sized headphone hole on the side of it. Yay, I thought. So I bought a 4gb memory card for it, today. And then I hit another problem.



Being a bit of a geek, my music is managed by iTunes, and I buy a lot of content from the iTunes Store. That means that I never have to have a clue where any of the folders are, I just open a piece of software and there it all is, listed neatly - and everything that goes on behind the scenes doesn't require my attention.

But now I want to transfer music onto a device which isn't an iPod. Easy if you want to select folders, but I want to be able to make a playlist and say "put that on my BlackBerry, dear software, and I shall listen to it sometime."

But no. iTunes goes "no, you are not Apple and frankly I think RIM is disgusting"

So what to do?

Well, obviously, I google. It's the answer to most things - shove it into Google, download some software and discover that you've downloaded from rimworld.com - and what you want isn't exactly wonderful.

But heh - this time, infact, I was correct. And there was a magical piece of software that lets me fill my phone with music.

Look at it. It's amazing!



You can download the app for your desktop here - http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/media/mediasync.jsp

And I am incredibly immature when writing about RIM.

Haha.

Nic x

The work that we're doing now at Simply Associates is to develop the WebWorks online resource - for kids to use the system during lunch times or at after school clubs, where teachers aren't available to actually do the teaching. It's better for the kids - because they get quality teaching, while the teachers love the fact they just have to make sure that no-one throws a computer at another person or even worse eats a biscuit over the keyboard.

The WebWorks Online Resource is essentially like buying a virtual teacher - schools buy access for their site to a website that has all of the WebWorks content on it. According to our own internal decisions, this is what it should contain:

blah

Over the next seven days, I am going to take you through each stage of developing one of these lessons. I've done two of my lessons, and I'm now onto module 5 of the course - that's when the kids create their very first page. And it's a rather complex lesson with 6 paper resources to get over, and although there's only 1 activity - it encompasses the whole of creating the first page of the site. It's a daunting experience for anyone to try and do, because it not only creates the first page - but it also creates the layout that will be used in the future for allllllllll of the pages in the site. Creating the mould, if you like.

And the first part of any lesson? We've got to create the index page for the lesson. That is a page which just contains the overview of the lesson - known as the "lesson objective".

In this case, we want the kids to have created the first page the SICC website, which matches the demo website we've created. There are many many different extension activities which can be used for this lesson if the kids find it particulally easy (when we worked at WHHS we found a lot of the kids there - older ones - found it easy and moved on, while teaching at Woodfield, I barely got into the second activity because I had to demonstrate the creation 3 or 4 times.)



It's very important that the lesson objective is succinct - and all of our lesson objectives were created based on a system called Plan>Create (the name being my first proper use of the mathmatic symbol - because Planning is a lot greater than creating), where myself and Nathan met every week to discuss a past completed lesson, a lesson we'd decided the objective of the week before and had created resources for, and one which we were going to be creating during the following week.

That means that each lesson took approximately a maximum of 3 weeks to complete and involved both teachers - meaning the course flows better than it might have done if we'd gone off and created these things seperately.

I've had such a long time to think about it, I've got too many choices. I think I'll start off with explaining exactly why I've not blogged daily for ages - and as many of you know, it's because I've had "a lot on."



Certainly over the next few days I will do my best to type up as many of the blogs that I have said I wanted to write and I will back post them onto the correct days that I thought of them on. If that makes sense?

Right, so to explain where I've been in an attempt to get back to things....

.

Tomorrow - the winner of the mug!