So when the neighbours were out at work, we blocked up the road for an hour with this huge great cement mixer, which discharged about fifty wheelbarrowloads (is that an imperial or metric unit?) of wet concrete and they went straight into our footings. All that digging, and the whole thing got filled up in [...]

Well it looked pretty substantial to me, but the building inspector measured the trench for our foundations, whistled through his teeth slightly, looked at the nearby growth and said: “Oh dear no, those are cherry trees. You’ll need to dig 1.4m deep, not 1.2m”. The builders were most polite (“You have to treat him like [...]

I knew it was asking for trouble: I said if I could have my new big telly, then Alex could have his trip to Disneyland and Mrs R could have something nice too. Oops. She opted for the new kitchen. And not just the new kitchen; the new extended kitchen. So here’s the house, before [...]

You’ll notice there’s a 10-week gap between this entry and the previous one. You may think the reason is probably because I couldn’t be a**ed to write anything while the sun was out. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I haven’t been able to publish anything, because as with a lot of [...]

Three gigs on consecutive weekdays – something of a record, methinks. Friday, and to the Cambridge Corn Exchange for a token dose of modern pop’n’roll, with The Zutons. Their selling point is more than just the originality of a female sax player at the forefront: they’ve cracked the formula of the singalong quite comfortably, although [...]

Just when you think the Eurovision Song Contest is past its sell-by date, like every year, it comes back and provides you with some unmissable entertainment once more. Now, the idea of getting the public to vote, which has been running these past few years, is obviously stupid; if there was a slight regional bias [...]

I’m delighted that Royle has gone. I didn’t want him in the first place, along with all those in the North Stand who were chanting “Royle out” before he’d even been appointed nearly four long seasons ago. In all that time, I think we’d agree he really didn’t win over many of the sceptics either. [...]

Last night we ate at Restaurant 22 at 22 Chesterton Lane, Cambridge. I wouldn’t normally think this worthy of a blog entry, but there seemed to be no record of the restaurant having a website when I scoured the search engines the day before. However, when we got there, its website was mentioned on its [...]

Mrs R is doing the Race For Life in June, committing herself to running 5km for charidee. Doesn’t sound much, 5 kilometres, but then I think: “Hang on – I’m really proud of myself for being able to run for 20 minutes on the treadmill at 10km an hour”. And by my calculations, that’s only [...]

They’ve announced the lineup for this year’s Folk Festival which takes place in my back garden (-ish) and it’s an intriguing one. Nice to see they’ve continued the trend of the last few years by avoiding the pop acts (it hasn’t hurt the ticket sales, so why not?) Headlining is “a rare and exclusive UK [...]