And another random post….
The branding from easyGroup is nearly always quite vibrant and they haven’t held back at their London offices in Kensington. I like that their branding is so recognisable, quite an achievement. As an irrelevant aside, I try and avoid anything from easyGroup since they started getting involved with practices such as those mentioned at https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/hard-cheese-for-stelios-in-easypizza-case. But each to their own….
I like this web-site, you can type in a word and it mentions when it was first used in the House of Commons.
http://parli-n-grams.puntofisso.net/hansard.php
It currently still only has data from 1919 onwards, but it’s still intriguing. In the above image, apparently the first time that the word Thatcherism was used was in 1978.
This is a handy free web-site, run by UCL and located at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/, which has records of how much slave owners were recompensed for their slaves, as well as names of businesses which gained from the process. Some of the sums of money were enormous that were paid out, Benjamin Caractacus Patey, who once lived in Norwich, got the equivalent of around £250,000 for the loss of his slaves. Companies such as Greene King are listed and there are maps of some of the slave estates.
It’s an interesting genealogical tool, although at the moment, it’s primarily of interest for finding out more about the slave owners than the slaves themselves. The project co-ordinators are though working on this for the next iteration of the project. It’s all been nicely put together as well.
Business Traveller is one of the magazines I always try and read, even though it’s all a bit expensive for me (the things they mention, not the magazine, I can read that for free).
Anyway, it strikes me that this level of decadence must be outside a fair number of the magazine readers’ wallets. I’m not sure that even my friend Richard is this decadent. And, how would anyone dare wear one of these? I’d be permanently worried that it’d be stolen or ripped off my wrist. I worry enough about my McCain’s backpack, let alone something of this value. And do people just keep them as investments? Who knows…. And there’s another watch in the magazine which is so expensive they won’t say how much it costs.
On a different matter, in the same magazine, BA have won the best short-haul airline and the best loyalty scheme, so that’s very well deserved from my favourite airline…. Although all this reading about international travel has reminded me that I’m not expecting to go overseas for another 54 days. Not that I’m counting.
And more in my riveting random drivel series of posts…. But, for 39p, this was a surprisingly good treat from Sainsbury’s, I haven’t heard of this one before. Sufficiently sweet and pineapplely (I would have been disappointed if there wasn’t much pineapple flavour) this was rather lovely.
There’s no shortage of banks in Romford and I was moderately surprised just how many people were waiting in the queue for them all. This is the queue at the HSBC and who said that customers are mostly switching to on-line banking?
Well, you learn something new every day…. I’m not sure how useful this knowledge is in my day to day life though.
This is just spam, unless the HM Courts are now operating from a favela in Brazil, which is mostly evident by it’s unlikely I’d get a penalty charge in the absence of owning a car….. Quite believeable though in some ways, although I’m amused by the fact there’s only one contact centre option and that’s currently unavailable. Hopefully no-one will get scammed by it.
This is perhaps one of the most uplifting and positive magazine covers that I’ve seen. Drawn by Charlie Mackesy, it’s rather impressive from the Big Issue.
This is another one of my random posts, but it never occurred to me that tours of the Belgian battlefields were being operated just a few months after the end of the First World War. I assume that relatives would want to go and see where their family had fought, and perhaps died, but it must have still been very much a scarred landscape.
