Backburner

Soul Catcher. Ah, there are two words to conjure with. And when the press picked up on one of BT’s research ideas a few years ago, conjure they did. To be fair, Soul Catcher did give a lot of scope for banner headlines. After all, at the time the newspapers, radio, TV and even Thought for The Day would have had you believe that by 2025, we’d all have a bit of silicon implanted behind our retina. This would record not only everything we saw, but all the outputs of our brain too. A life in … Continue Reading

…as Simon Mayo used to say. Slightly fraudulent as I feel about coming back after ten days with what boils down to an advert, I thought some might be curious as to what our church might produce when given a 25-minute blank sheet for BBC Radio Wales. The answer is a service called ‘Looking Forward, Looking Back’, it’s on tomorrow (the 29th) at 8.05 am, and it contains – though I admit some possible bias in this – a fine drama written by my wife. 882 kHz AM/93-104 MHz FM if you’re within Wales, or … Continue Reading

A few hours to go till every blogger in the UK will seem to put fingers to keyboard and start fêting the five winners of this year’s Guardian British Blog Awards (to be revealed, I would think, here after about 01:00 GMT). That reminds me to pass on a request seen on the weblog of former European Blogger of the Year, Tom Coates. He asks ‘How many weblogs are there in the UK?’ It’s a good question, that raises all sorts of issues in itself: how much of a gap is there in weblogging population, proportionately, … Continue Reading

One of the current poster adverts for the BBC’s new radio stations reads “Make time for BBC digital radio. Fall ill.” Assuming that you’re reading it in the right way, there’s more truth in that than even the BBC might realise.

Laid up in bed in the aftermath of having my appendix removed at the age of eleven, with no television and advice against lifting a book, I discovered radio, and started consuming it in vast quantities. I discovered the wit (and record collection) of Martin Kelner on Radio 2, making me aware of Cat Stevens’ back … Continue Reading

As a coda to our church’s typically rewarding pilgrimage to Bethlehem (no, not that one: this one), Roddy introduces me and a group of others to geocaching.

As a vague description of it, try hi-tech orienteering. Armed with nothing more than a GPS unit (a satellite receiver which will detect your location to within about three metres) and a grid reference, you attempt to find a cache, previously placed at that spot by another geocacher. The cache can be as small as a film container or as large as … Continue Reading

THIS BRIDGE WILL BE

CLOSED

ON WEDNESDAY 10TH BETWEEN

5 PM AND APPROX 8 PM

FOR

THIS BRIDGE’S OPENING

And no, it’s not a swing bridge.

“Be very careful about what you write on paper”, my primary school teacher warned us. “What you write will last. You’ll still be able to read what you’ve written in fifty years if you use a pencil. A century if you use a pen.”

A couple of decades on from his attempt to knock some writing style into a bunch of unruly ten year-olds, who’d rather throw ink cartridges at each other than ponder the Mabinogion, I realise two things. One, that whatever planet he was on when he got those timespans was an interesting one. Two, that he … Continue Reading