The Roquefort Files

(With apologies to Aileen Paterson.) A couple of weekends ago now, I had a Proper Weekend. For the first time in ages, a Saturday and Sunday were blighted neither by an excessive hangover nor unreasonably crappy weather and were filled just so with pleasantly engaging activities. If it didn’t feel pompous to do so, I’d [...]

I’ve bought a car. Not for me another dinky Japanese roadster or quirky Swedish meatball; no, this time I’ve gone down the classic and under-appreciated temperamental Italian sports car route and bought myself an Alfa Romeo GTV. I may be over-egging the case a little, but the truth is that Alfa’s reputation for reliability and [...]

I was back in Fife last weekend for my sister’s 30th birthday. My Dad has finally tumbled to the fact that cans of beer left in a draughty cupboard for a couple of hours before a shindig do not become chilled to any perceptible degree, and so this time round a pair of ice-laden pails [...]

For Christmas I was given a day at Cook School by Martin Wishart. I didn’t know anything about Martin Wishart, so I looked him up. Turns out he’s a Michelin-starred chef specialising in French cuisine; he has one restaurant in Leith, another at Loch Lomond, and a cookery school down the road from my work. [...]

(A brief intermission before I attack the mountain of LA/LV notes from September.) A few numbers for you: ten merry men. Three Norman bad guys. One Robin Hood. One cross-dressing ‘Maid’ Marian. One racially insensitive Azeem costume. Josh was up. It rocked.

This is the calm before the storm. Very little out of the ordinary is happening to distract me at the moment and so I’m free, metaphorically speaking, to stand and stare, rabbit-like, into the headlights of the upcoming Vancouver trip. Predictably, the HR, finance and management drones involved in this whole enterprise appear to be [...]

Yes, the dog-related puns will just keep on comin’. Things have been quiet of late; not boring as such, but to borrow and roundly abuse a mathematical metaphor, the graph of excitement against time is smoother than normal even as the integral of said graph is somewhat greater. Dog ownership enforces more responsibility and regularity [...]

I think I must be overcompensating for an ascetic, near-teetotal existence in Glasgow. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve met up with anyone and everyone I could in an effort to break in my drinking habit again. A couple of Fridays ago, Doug, Keef and I engaged in a mini pub crawl around the [...]

Not only have we arrived back in Edinburgh, I think we may also have arrived back in 2005. Two birthday parties in as many days; fry-ups with Josh, talking up world domination via the infallible medium of an iPhone application; a commute to work which takes less time than a trip to the bathroom, and [...]

Despite a few weeks of rapid-fire social engagements providing plenty of grist for the mill, I seem to be suffering from writer’s block. I could tell you at length how to scribe skirting board or build a bath panel from scratch, but throwing down a few hundred words to describe anything other than DIY is [...]