Adam Tinworth

A Gentleman's Duel

A Gentlemen Duel

[via James]

Why Your Coffee Sucks - And How To Make It Better

Your coffee sucks, apparently, and indeed, much of the coffee we consume does suck. Some years ago, while I was working on a now-defunct magazine for the hotel and restaurant industry (called, prosaically, Hotel & Restaurant) I was treated to a presentation on how to prepare good coffee from a coffee distributor. That meeting changed my attitude to coffee, which I'd only just started drinking in granule form. I quickly switched to "real" ground coffee, drunk quickly after grinding, and treated as a perishable foodstuff. Now I have a hankering for more, better, newer coffee. There's some great starting points in the comments of that post.

Blast from the Past in my RSS

Publicschool

I was rather surprised to see the above picture on the Adam Smith Institute blog… It's my old school, Dollar Academy. The fact that the kid on the left looks much like I did back then doesn't help.

Ironically, the post is about the status of English private schools. And Dollar is very much in Scotland.

Ladies Love Leather (Apparently)

Now, I love a woman in a leather dress as much as the next straight man. So, the news that the above Marks & Spencer dress is flying off the shelves (it's out of stock only a week after it was launched) should be enough to put a smile on my face for weeks, or at least, for the rest of the autumn season.

The Daily Mail is busy singing its praises, and it was noticed by some bloggers weeks ago (and some commenters). 

 And yet...

Well, for one thing, I really do fail to understand the "hit dress" idea. Every woman I know has a quiet horror of turning up at a "do" in the same dress as another woman. Surely the very notion of "hit dress" should be a big, flashing neon sign warning women away?

And, is it me, or does that dress looks a bit, well, cheap? Somehow, both the M&S image on the left, and the Daily Mail one on the right make a genuine leather dress look like pleather. And that can't be good.

Fleeing to the Country

This, or something very much like it, is my dream for the near future:

We are moving out of our two-bedroom flat and into a proper house with an upstairs, a garden and sheds. More than that, we are leaping from the edgy Islington/Holloway borders (within shouting distance of the Arsenal stadium and the prison) to a Surrey village with a lively parish council. I'm excited, but I'm also terrified we're making a huge mistake.

Blogathon: the Movie

Today was the RBI Charity Blogathon. Here's a quick bit of movie I grabbed on my phone towards the end of the day:

RBI Hacks-a-blogging

Horror of My Youth

A while ago, I replaced my few remaining tapes with iTunes downloads to tidy up my music collection a little.

Maybe I shoudl have listened to the tapes before I did so, because I ended up paying for this:

Are You Ready: Remastered

Bucks Fizz

And it's rubbish.

What was I thinking when I was a kid?

Steel and Eye

Steel and Eye

Reading Break

Reading Break

The UK's First Log Built House?

Another one from the "press releases for my old job, but I'm still interested" file:

Look at that - lovely log cabin under construction. Canada? The US? Switzerland, maybe? Uh, no. It's Norfolk. Mike Balls of the Log House Company is building log houses in the UK, and this one is going up for a Norfolk family. The timber's locally sourced and it is, they claim, the UK's first log-built house. I've not idea if you could get a mortgage on it, or what it would be like to live in, but my, it looks lovely, doesn't it?