According to bbc news you now get an automatic £80 fine if you don’t renew or obtain a tax disc for your car. I’m not sure how they could prove that you’ve not taken the car off the road (which I think you are meant to tell them that you’ve done) but then you rely on the postal service….one to deliver the reminder notice that your tax disc is about to run out (assuming that they’ve not stopped doing this for (conveniently) cost savings) and also to deliver the letter to the dvla from yourself to say that you’ve taken the car off the road.
The BBC reports that thousands of shoppers flock for sales bargains, and I think they were all trying to get into John Lewis’s and Sainsburys at Cheadle. The carpark was *full* – I don’t think there was a single space available and as a result the queue to get off the Wilmslow bypass was horrendous and took about 20-30 minutes. We stopped off at TGI-Fridays, which was late opening due to technical difficulties, walked over to the two shops and got some Tesco vouchers to subsidise the meal at TGI’s. Then popped back to Handforth and we got a Kingsize duvet for me (as my old one wasn’t pocketed or feathered and kept clumping up at the bottom of the bed) from Allders. Fortunately they still had some left although the pile that was there earlier in the day was drastically reduced. I reckon the shops made a massive turnover yesterday (dread to think what it was like on Boxing day). Interestingly Allders had a sign up saying they were not doing returns and that this did not affect our statutory rights…..not quite convinced that is right!
A good list of top 100, best of, worst of lists for the year 2003. I really liked the MSNBC year in pictures slideshow with synchronised audio – you will need broadband to view this one though!
What is interesting is that by my reckoning there are still 9 days left!
I guess I beat Mike and Angela to blogging about tonights meal at the cheesecake factory. Angela didn’t have the portobello mushrooms OR mentioned that she had cheated by looking at the menu before coming out! Kristen had a chicken salad that was huge – it was all stacked up in a pyramid and looked really good. The crispy beef strips were really good and the cheesecakes were also excellent afterwards (and we were good and saved some for the doggy bag to take home). It was good to finally meet up with some American (or even any) bloggers in real life and we had a good time. (I’ll upload some pictures soon, honest). Easton is a neat shopping centre – best described as a lifestyle shopping mall – for people with expensive tastes – certainly the shops didn’t seem to be the normal shops that you see in a mall – or at least not in the part of the mall that we went to.
Kristen and I also saw Timeline this afternoon which wasn’t bad – it was a bit cheesy but still an entertaining couple of hours – I just want to read the book now and see how it should be done properly, in my imagination.
Update Pictures are at
Interesting article about speed camera’s, in particular the Spec’s camera’s and the email hoax that claims the new signs on the M4 are speed cameras. The site it links to has interesting facts and figures about the camera’s, in particular the ones on the M6 over the Thelwall viaduct near us.
Apparently the final Concorde has made its final landing at bristol. It seems like concorde has had more encore’s and finale’s than a very popular band at a concert. Its had final this, final that but hopefully this is the last one.
I totally sympathise with this report that mentions that 12 million european workers have asked for a cut in salary or work shorter hours due to the amount of stress they are suffering and the lack of a quality of life in their (permanently shrinking) personal life. Now I wouldn’t have thought people would have been asking for a drop in salary OR shorter hours – I would have thought it would be both. At one point a couple of months back I was seriously considering reducing my hours by 10% by requesting to take every other friday off. That would mean a drop in pay and it would be really hard if I ever needed to go back to working 5 days a week again.
Reading the BBC web page about Rally stars given driving bans I’m still not clear why they were driving on public roads as part of their practiising. A bit of a pain to have been banned for something like that…as to the story of the guy doing over the limit 7 times, isn’t there something called in law to stop you getting done for the same thing twice (or seven times)?
…and now I’m shattered. A great concert on Friday night, but no BlueJacking as there were no phones switched on before,during or after the concert. I did show a couple of other people how its done though. Saturday was a wedding down in Bath, followed by walking around bath Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning taking loads of pictures. Since Friday night we’ve taken over 250 photo’s. That will take some organising and uploading!
The Register reports that there are plans afoot to broadcast more HitchHikers Guide to the Galxy on the radio. Can’t wait.