Poltergeist

In the run up to Halloween, here is another true and strange tale of the paranormal. I will post a new strange true story each day so don’t miss them. up in my house was on the whole, pretty good. We had great parents, almost every weekend we were gone camping somewhere, we had two proper holidays each year and I have no complaints at all. Just a bunch of heartfelt thanks to my parents and a growing sense of awe as to how they did all that with three small boys and not a lot of money. When I was eleven, we moved. It was a good move to be honest from a terraced three up, two down in west Hull to a rather nice semi-detached outside of Hull.

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Keeping Everyone Happy

Last week in London, we pulled off our first conference. Pulling together something like a conference is a real feat of organization and hard work I can tell you! It also has a lot of stakeholders who all want something different from the event. The attendees, the sponsors, the exhibitors and so on. Pleasing them all is really tough to do and none of them really care much about how complex everything is or how difficult it is to pull off a complex event like this – they just want you to meet their objectives. To be honest, it reminded me a little of life! In life, I think it is exactly the same way. People expect things from you and they are not actually in possession of the facts

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Duty Free?

I have been traveling quite a bit recently and indeed, I am just back from London. Me being me, I couldn’t help wondering why we still call the shops in airports duty free? Plainly, they are not or if they are, something else is wrong. I ended up asking the manager of one such store why, if the store was duty free, could I buy Maltesers much cheaper in the High St.? He didn’t seem to know so I asked about cigarettes – same price as the High St. Well, inside the EU apparently, duty free isn’t duty free anymore. It is my friends a con and I counted several items in a duty free that were more than 20% more expensive than the corner store near my Hotel in

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The Big Adventure

I haven’t managed to take in a live Hull City game for several years unfortunately. The last game was an away game versus Leicester City that I decided on the spur of the moment to go to. At the time, my son Liam and I were visiting family in Hull and we were heading back down to London and the airport at Gatwick for Liam to fly home. We set off on the Saturday morning and in the back of my mind, I had a half a mind to jump off the M1 and go grab the game in Leicester. Of course, the M62 was a packed with traffic due to an accident and so by the time we got to the M1 I wasn’t at all sure that we

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We Dared to Dream

Yesterday, we dared to dream Hoped to mark our spot in history Engraved our name in time Yesterday, we came out strong A shock really did look on It’s been more than a century Players have come and gone I even went to school with one Yesterday, we dared to dream And what a long wait it’s been The Tigers’ shone yesterday Just like that other rhyme Burning brightly under London skies And 10 minutes after kick off It looked as if we may pull it off In the end it wasn’t to be But the Tigers marked Their place in history Written indelibly We dared to dream!

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Reading the News

Whenever I return to the UK and listen to the news on TV I am always forced to conclude that newsreaders there must go to some special school of news reading. I’ve seen the news on TV in many many countries now but the UK is unique and fairly strange. I know people living there don’t notice but it is something to do with vocal inflection. The newsreaders’ vocal inflection is simply all wrong and they always go down at the end of a sentence. It drives me nuts. It makes them sound as if they were afflicted with some strange mental disease from my perspective. It sounds condescending too if I am honest. As if, these superior news readers know something I don’t. I always notice this on every

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London

Well, I hadn’t been to London in a while and how it has changed! Its a big building site in the City but I understand most of these new buildings remain empty or will be empty when completed. For me, London has become a very modern and actually very nice city with all of that recent development. However, it takes ages to get around the city. We took a cab from Tower Bridge to one of the railway stations and it took around 40 minutes and costs a small fortune. The driver did take us the scenic route though it would seem and I was able to get a look at Big Ben and Buckingham Palace en route… I was hoping to make it over to Watkins Book shop but

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London Here We Come!

Well, unless by tomorrow early afternoon we are finally under water after all the rain we are having, I will be headed to London for a couple of days for a business trip. This most likely means I won’t post anything on my blogs….much to everyone’s relief. However, I did have a guest article published yesterday on Dee Doanes blog so possibly y’all could go check that out while I am gone??? Instead of writing I hope I will get to do some reading as I have loaded my iPad Kindle app with some good stuff….. Wonder if it will ever stop raining here in Prague? Normally by now I’d have a tan. This year I am rusting. See ya…

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A New Year

Perhaps you are wondering why I have gone so quiet? Maybe not but I havent posted much here for a couple of weeks. The reason is I am hard at work on my new book – a novel – and I cant stop working on it. It has become my obsession and every spare minute I am writing. The book is called The Last Observer and I first thought of the concept about five years ago. I discussed it with my eldest son in a pub in London around that time and he was very taken by the plot…so much so he keeps asking me how it is going…. So here we are in another new year. In reality, its just another day and I have always wondered why folks

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Soul for Sale?

What do Jimmy Saville and Lance Armstrong have in common? They both fooled everyone for quite a considerable time and both were considered heros. I feel a deep sense of disappointment and outrage regarding the pair of them and others like them. They are not alone. Without perhaps subscribing to what I consider to be rather silly conspiracy theories, I have long suspected that many successful people have ‘sold their souls’. No, I am not saying that they wrote some contract with Satan or Elizabeth Hurley! I am simply saying that at some point either their quest for fame led them to do things that otherwise they may not have done in order to succeed or perhaps, having succeeded their egos got so engorged with fame, they decided they could

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