bitful

Massive pillow fight in Leicester Square yesterday afternoon:

I had to join in, even if it means I almost dropped my camera. I also have some photos of the pillow fight on Flickr.
It was very pointless, yet exhilarating, and it put a smile on my face - until I thought of whoever would have to clean [...]

I seem to be unable to travel without electronics to keep me entertained during trips. A what? A 'book', you say? Is it something I can download on my phone?
So when I book seats I try and get one that's got a power outlet for laptops and phones.
Not if you book online, you can't. You [...]

Air France, said the reservation. And the check-in counter, and the boarding pass.
And the crew's uniforms at the gate. One of them looked at my boarding pass, then projected "Le six" across the queue to her colleague entering boarding pass numbers into a machine.
So imagine my surprise when the terminal bus delivered me in front [...]

I owe you an explanation, don't I?
Weeks without a proper post on these pages, apart from Word of the Day, My Week on the Web and sometimes 7 Things I Did Not Know Last Week.
Not a lack of time per se, but rather a shift in priorities.
A new position at work that's briliant and absorbs [...]

Starting this morning at 8am, Big Ben is not going to chime for a few weeks while maintenance work is carried out.
I am told that at night we can sometimes hear the bongs from our flat. But at night I am sleeping and don't hear a thing. And how can Dr B. hear Big Ben [...]

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Cheap and grumpy, originally uploaded by bitful.

Blimey. A cameraphone photo I snapped at Wong Key last December has been selected for inclusion in the newly released third edition of the Schmap London Guide.
View my [...]

Yesterday at work I overheard a colleague speaking on the phone about his recent trip to Italy:

Yes, we were in Bologna. How bizarre, you know, people, when they give you change, they don't touch you!

And I knew exactly what he meant. Every business establishment (at least in Northern Italy, not entirely sure about other places) [...]

What a lovely break. I approached it somewhat tentatively, because my last beach holiday was not very relaxing (big group of people, lots of partying, living mainly during the night - nothing I couldn't do in London). But I kept an open mind and went with the flow.
The flow consisted of a perfect mix of [...]

I am leaving on Thursday morning for five days in Spain, and along with scouring the city to get myself a good stock of cheap SPF50 lotion, I've been finding three new ways to revise and improve my Spanish (last time I only Michel Thomassed myself until my ears were bleeding in Spanish):

Marina and Ben's [...]

Tomorrow Italian catholic groups are staging a national rally against civil partnerships and in support of traditional families.
That is, if you have not got a mummy and a daddy (or have more than one), or if you happen to shack up with someone of the same sex, you are made to feel like scum.
I cleverly [...]

I've been in Italy for the last few days to see my mother who is in hospital.
It is very hard to say whether it is serious or not; she had been losing a considerable amount of blood through her faeces and was taken into hospital to receive some blood transfusions and to undergo a series [...]

I lived in Paris for six and a half years but had not been there for three. Here are a few things I found out during our weekend in Paris a couple of weeks ago.

Despite being almost entirely underground (except Bastille station and for the Seine-crossing at Pont de Neuilly), Line 1 of the Paris [...]

Dr B.'s Hilton points (collected throughout one and a half years of working away from London and being put up in one of the chain's branches for three to four nights a week) were going to expire at the end of April, so he took me and his parents to Paris and used them to [...]