The Tale of Guy Fawkes
When I was a kid, bonfire night or Guy Fawkes night was an invite to Withey's house to watch my Dad or Terry Withey making a nonsense of the theory that you never return to an apparently dud firework. All we really knew about Guy himself was that he plotted to blow-up parliament and was apparently a bit of a traitor, rather than 17th-century proof that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Of course, with the advent Google ...
Paul Heaton & Jacqui Abbot – Wisdom, Laughter and Lines
When The Beautiful South finally called it a day in the mid-noughties, Paul Heaton conceded that in music, in the words of the late Joe Strummer, "when you are hot, you are hot, when you are not, you are not." Accepting that his days of commercial success were behind him, Heaton embarked on a solo career that was only really noticed by the likes of me and a scattering others who have suffered from Heaton bias ever since he first emerged as ...
Jose Mourinho – A Psychologists Dream
Psychologists will tell you that one of the toughest aspects of winning something or indeed, reaching any sporting, personal or financial goal, is lifting yourself or those around you, to levels of motivation to repeat the process or set new targets. Achieving a goal comes with all sorts of psychological challenges and many athletes describe feelings of emptiness and a fear of the future when something they have worked for since childhood has ...
The Bombay Sapphire
When brown signs for the Bombay Sapphire arrived all over Basingstoke a while ago, I have to admit that I initially thought it was a new Indian restaurant somewhere in Overton. However, knowing Indian restaurants after being involved with them in the past in a professional capacity, I am aware of how ferociously they protect their cash and brown sign posts are not cheap; in fact, they range between 8 to 40 thousand pounds for a single ...
Why Do Celebrity Peers Demonise the Poor?
After a largely uneventful working week, I managed to bring Friday to a spectacular climax by creating an unenviable situation where I managed to upset two of my customers in the space of an hour. The detail is too complex to elaborate on (due to my all new shortened blogs) but it was a situation that could have been avoided by better communication from all parties but ended with me, the supplier, having to make all the grovelling apologies...