Some years ago I spent a lovely week with some friends on a tour around Transylvania. Our guide, Ramona, told us on a number of occasions that the scenery we were seeing was lovely, but that her favourite place to go walking was Maramureş. So this year I decided to spend a week there. I got [...]

After writing about how many Panini stickers collectors should expect to buy to fill a book  I’ve had a fair few comments about it.  Greg Newman brought John Crace’s article in The Guardian to my attention where he talks about “the four-yearly great Panini conspiracy theory.”  The conspiracy being that Panini don’t distribute the stickers [...]

Yesterday I was over at my sister’s, and her lad was excited because he had the new South Africa World Cup 2010 Panini sticker book. He had also bought four packets, each with five stickers in them, and I had the important job of unpeeling them so that he could put them in the [...]

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The government responded to the snappily titled Policy options [...]

University Challenge is a great British institution, only improved by picking a side to support each week. Some people get a bit tribal about football, but I’m a bit more up my own arse and cheer on academics instead.
So anyway, this is my flowchart for who I support on University Challenge each week.

Will Hutton makes some interesting points about class, and why it still matters, in a recent Observer piece.  But he’s also made a rather startling mistakes in his maths.  He states that
The good luck of being born into the right family is profound. Two American researchers, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, show how children from [...]

At the start of the year I spent 10 days on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.  The whole island has been created by volcanic activity and I was fascinated by its many different geological features such as the Jameos del Agua and La Cueva de los Verdes.
I also visited one volcano where you can walk [...]

The other Sunday I went for a walk around a part of the boundary of the Eastside regeneration area in Brum. No, really.
It was a part of Nikki Pugh’s Uncertain Eastside project and turned out to be less of a “walk” and more of a “people clamber around a bit and take photos”. [...]