Magnum Mistake

Spotted this advertising poster for Magnum Tempation ice-cream in a tube station yesterday. You'd think, wouldn't you, that someone, someone, would have spotted the rogue apostrophe before the copy went live and huge on a tube station wall?

Coronation Street Weekly Update, July 19 2010

I've been writing Coronation Street weekly updates since 1995 and this week's Coronation Street update has just gone live here.

This week Sally Webster made a grand return to the Street.

Roxy Music at Lovebox

To the Lovebox festival on Saturday to dance around in the park and see Roxy Music for the first time. They were brilliant, very strong and tight with a 90 minute set that chose not to pander to the faint-hearted fans with a greatest hits set.

Instead, they played a lot, and I mean a lot, of their very early hits before adding in My Only Love and Jealous Guy. Everything else came from the early 70s and sounded wonderfully fresh. The singalong at the end and encore included some hits - Love is the Drug, Virginia Plain, Let's Stick Together, Do the Strand, but it was the whole of their set that I adored, even if I didn't know all of the songs. Bryan Ferry still looks incredible and sounds wonderful too.

Other highlights from the day were Trojan Sound System who got one too-small area of the festival reggae rocking. I still maintain that dancing to reggae in the sunshine should be compulsory for, you know, everyone. And when Duran Duran turned up unannounced to liven up the dull Mark Ronson set with Planet Earth, I wished I'd brought my handbag to dance around.

It's been two years since I was last at Lovebox - you can read about that here - and in that time it seems that for most young women, festivals are less about the music and more about a chance to show off new Cath Kidston wellies. But on a dry, sunny day?

New broom, sweeps clean

They, whoever they are, say it's one of life's most stressful events.

After four months of tricky negotiation with buyers, our house sale is now off and our home is back up for sale.

They, whoever they are, are right.

Coronation Street Weekly Update, July 12 2010

I've been writing Coronation Street weekly updates since 1995 and this week's Coronation Street update has just gone live here.

This week the update's got chicken legs.

Coronation Street Weekly Update, July 5 2010

I've been writing Coronation Street weekly updates since 1995 and this week's Coronation Street update has just gone live here.

This week the update's got electrickery.

No way, Special K

The muffin top needs some adjustment so I've just signed up to join the Special K two week weight loss plan. Answered all the questions and received my personalised plan that has me eating scrambled eggs on toast three, yes three, times in the first week.

No way, Special K. Pharp.

Garden in July

Packing up our house to leave London later this year, it'll be our garden I'll miss the most. For all of the blog posts I've written on Flaming Nora about Naming Flora have a look here.

Garden of light at night

Our garden at night twinkles and shines, with the help of tea-lights and a summer sun that sets behind the north London bricks. Minutes after taking this picture on a hot summer's night, the evening got hotter and lighter when our next door neighbour decided to get rid of an apple tree in their garden by pouring petrol all over it and setting it on fire. Not nice.

Dance, Trance and Hard House vinyl for sale

Moving house always forces a person into what the makeover queen Anne Maurice calls decluttering and everyone else calls having a tidy up and throw out.

As part of our, er, decluttering then, my lovely man is selling off a fraction of his massive vinyl record collection, the dance, trance and hard house years. Whistles and glow sticks are available from other retailers.

It's all for sale on eBay right here.

Glass class

Being a huge fan of glass art, I was more than a bit pleased to stumble across a contemporary glass exhibition this week in central London.

It's on at the Contemporary Applied Arts Centre in Percy Street and the exhibition's called Remarkable Glass.

There was one piece by artist Anne Claude Jeitz that had me almost in tears, such was the beauty and delicacy of it. I love glass art, me.