Ordinarily I would find that quite dull, but it was alright really. Newcastle won (that’s the rugby team, of course) and I took part in a raffle where I won the only prize – a bottle of gin!

Emlyn had a good day as well, winning a fiver on a scratchcard. We all went out to the Old Brown Jug to celebrate John’s birthday, which is where I sit now. It’s all been very enjoyable but I am extremely tired now; and those magic governmental pixies are stealing one hour of my bedtime!

The last paragraph of a BBC News article reads:

Sir Fred was given his knighthood for services to banking in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in June 2004.

What would you do?

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion.

“It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

“Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.”

Stephen McNamara, spokesman for Ryanair, via Travolution

You might be wondering what provoked such an astonishing attack on the general public and drew members of staff from Ryanair into a heated argument abusing its customers. Not exactly “textbook stuff” is it?

It started on Jason Roe’s website, where he highlighted a harmless but amusing little bug on the Ryanair website. Simply by navigating their site in a perfectly normal way (no real tricks used here) the website appears to set the cost of the ticket to £0. Of course, when you try to proceed to acquire these tickets for free, the website will stop you. That’s sensible. But still, it’s a misleading bug and for a company to seemingly offer a ticket for free and take it away again isn’t good. At the very least, you would expect any self-respecting company to try to fix it, or at the very least warn customers that repeating such a sequence will result in an invalid session.

But no. As you will see in the comments on Jason Roe’s site, some people purporting to be from Ryanair starting throwing personal insults towards Roe. Later analysis of the IP addresses confirmed they are actually Ryanair customers, further supported by this spokesman.

So. Hmmm. Make up your own mind!

One question I asked with alarm in my mind is: “what the hell have they done to the place?”, to which the answer is “just about nothing”, which is about the worst thing they could have done. Few shops have changed hands and those that have been replaced were pretty much exactly the same but with a different name.

I wondered back into Milton Regis, saw my old house and had a brief look around the south of the village. The iron works is still there, though the garage has been replaced by a new housing area. The plants and trees in my old gardens were much taller now, but other than that, it’s all the same.

It’s funny really. You’d expect to be sad if things changed and you weren’t able to recognise the place, but Sittingbourne is completely different. When it seems like nothing has happened since you left, it’s as if they haven’t learned anything at all. It’s still crap, but there is still that strange attraction…

Remember this tonight, or else you may look a fool celebrating 2009 in 2008! Happy New Year everyone!

The National Blood Service has been contacting me quite a lot lately to get me to donate. I’ve been unable to donate these past few months and hopefully I should be able to this time round… only the next session is Boxing Day. On finding that out it hit home that blood really is needed all the time, even though we would sooner wish our nurses and doctors a restful holiday over Christmas.

I went the NBS website a few minutes ago and saw this graph. It’s the stock of blood supply that’s been available over the last few months, and it’s a story familiar to the NBS that in the closing months of the year supplies dwindle. It seems this year however this glut is more serious.

So, if you can, do.

The first, as I mentioned before, was simply the respect for each other. However, most people seem to forget that respect is so abstract that it isn’t simply given or received on the basis of word or deed. Therefore, one cannot show respect simply by declaring it, nor can a person demand evidence of respect. Hence we cannot show respect at all, they might only imply its presence.

The second is as simple as the first. It is lowering the "offence threshold". For example, if someone you knew all your life slipped a swearword into a conversation, on what basis should you consider that offensive? I feel people forget that offence should only be taken if it was an intended outcome. I fail to understand the uproar following the "Brand-Ross affair", since, although not entirely pleasant for those concerned, there was no intent to offend and the respective parties have apologised and those apologies accepted. I would deem that matter at this point final and closed. However, many thousands, I would hedge, have purposefully lowered their "offence threshold" to add some sensation to their lives with disregard to popular culture.

So I come to Channel 4, who have refused to request that Jamie Oliver carefully sieves the flour of his words to remove some of those lumpy old swearwords in case someone complains the cake is too lumpy. From this BBC News article, Julian Bellamy, head of programmes for Channel 4 said, "When you watch these shows it’s very clear that the fruity language he uses is a real response to the shock and anger at what he sees [and] his passion and determination to change things," and that Channel 4 should feel no pressure to act under "cultural conservatism and censorship". If Jamie Oliver isn’t intending to offend, why get upset over it?

Grow up, Britain!

I’ve pretty much finished my desk: a few finishing touches and it’ll be done. I have started to move things about in my room but I haven’t finished. I’ve done quite a few other jobs too as I went and left others that should have been a priority.

I think that’s a good analogy of life for me at the moment: I’m doing jobs I shouldn’t be doing and distracting myself from more important things. Things I once found fun seem such a drag now. And the only thing people want to know from me is whether I have found a job. It’s frustrating me a little. I know people mean well but having to report little in the way of news on that front discourages me. When I get a job, I will tell people.