I love my new StatCounter tool. I installed it a few days ago but it’s invisible so you won’t see it (the counter on the right is from a different website and it doesn’t give me any details). StatCounter lets me see where my readers are coming from, what they’ve looked at, how they got [...]

There are quite a few people who have worked at The Australian and now live in London and we have been getting together for drinks every few months. We’ve met in a wine bar in London Bridge, a dim sum place in Shoreditch and last night went to a gastropub in Farringdon (the Peasant and [...]

I have been waiting for almost a month for a parcel from Australia to arrive. It left Australia before Easter and I have been getting increasingly anxious because it contains valuables. My fears were confirmed this morning when Royal Mail told me that the parcel had officially gone missing. It left Australia on 12 April, [...]

On Sunday morning I took the train down to the Isle of Wight. It took me three hours from London Waterloo all the way to Lake, a village on the south-eastern coast of the island between Shanklin and Sandown. I changed to a ferry at Portsmouth and then back to a local train across the [...]

An Irish immigrant asks for work at a Sydney building site. Aussie foreman asks, “Well, it depends on your construction experience. Can you tell the difference between a girder and a joist?”. “That’s an easy one,” replies the applicant. “Goethe wrote Faust and Joyce wrote Ulysses.”

The town of Ecija in Spain has destroyed the lost Roman city of Colonia Augusta Firma Astigi (a rival to Cordoba and Seville in its day) to build a council carpark. According to the report in The Sunday Times, they found the ruins beneath the main square when excavating for the carpark. They discovered a [...]