Chocolate matters

I watched an article on Newsnight last week about the exploitation of child labour on the cocoa farms of the Ivory coast. The BBC web site recently posted a similar article about how child Cocoa workers are still exploited. The likelihood is that the chocolate we eat day-to-day is made at least in part from […]

Broken tooth

Last week when eating breakfast I felt a twinge of protest from a tooth as I crunched on a hard bit of cereal. Shortly afterwards I crunched on something even harder – it was about a quarter of one of my teeth which had broken off, leaving a rather exposed bit of ‘inner tooth’ (I […]

Why is my life so boring?

Looking through the search strings which have brought people to this blog, I noticed one question – why is my life so boring? I don’t know why my blog got listed from this search – hopefully it’s not the search engine’s judgment on the content … But actually quite often life does seem rather mundane. […]

Mooschrooms

Here’s another photo from our time in Spain. This is another of my favourites, but for different reasons. It was taken outside a cafe in the square by the cathedral in Valencia. English spelling is difficult, and not only do I admire the bar’s owners for providing a full English breakfast, but they almost get […]

Migration

Just before leaving for Spain I watched an article on the BBC news describing the perilous 1000 mile sea journey that many Senegalese people were making, aiming to reach the Canary islands with the hope of a new life in Spain. The article made quite an impact on me. On one hand, you couldn’t help […]

Onda

Well I’m back from my six weeks college placement in Onda, Spain. We had a great time and I’ve got lots to say. But for now I’ll just post a portion of one of my favourite photos of Onda. Onda is a thriving and growing industrial town, but it has plenty of history and a […]

Snow!

I´m currently ín Spain for a college placement. I don´t have much internet access which is why I´ve not written anything here for a while. Sorry about this, but there´ll be plenty to write about when I get back shortly!! Anyway for now, I´d just like to talk about snow. My memories of my childhood […]

Christmas presence

I’m currently enjoying a nice relaxing Christmas vacation – in fact, so relaxing that I haven’t written any new blog posts for a while:-) This will only be a short one too. The holiday has been great so far, with the usual mix of a relaxing time, nice food and not too many urgent tasks […]

Communication at Christmas

Communication is important. That’s not to say that I’m very good at it – but over the last few months, as we’ve desperately tried to get in touch with various people with limited success, it’s been brought home to me how frustrating it is when communication is one sided. When someone communicates you know that […]

Christmas shopping

Yes December is here – which means every shop has long been decked out with their Christmas paraphernalia and is repeatedly playing the two Christmas CDs it possesses. And almost everything that the shop is selling has artificial snow on it. You can probably tell already that I’m not the world’s greatest fan of shopping […]