Month: September 2001

quick Brighton restaurant round

A quick Brighton restaurant round-up. So far, the places’s we’ve tried include:

Jim Thompson’s a mix of all things oriental. It’s right by the Palace Pier, over looking the sea, so
I thought “oh-oh, it’s going to be great location, terrible food”. But I was wrong
the food is good, but the cocktails are terrible. Watery is the only way I can describe them. Could it
be because we were at the “2 cocktails for the price of 1” night? If so they should rename it to “2 crap cocktails for the price of 1” night. One of the local radio stations ran one of their ads which claimed “the best cocktails in Brighton”. God help us.

In contrast is the small Greek/Spanish/Italian mix of Ipanema. We were tempted
with the sign out side selling us fresh Snapper and Monk Fish. What were we expecting? Something
along the lines of the fresh fish we’d eaten in New Zealand. Naturally we were disappointed.
It’s not a bad place; but we were underwhelmed.

Le Gastronome is an expensive but lovely French restaurant. Yum. It was full when we
arrived, so we left despondent. Half-way down the road the owner comes running
after us to tell us they’ve just had a cancellation and there was now space for us. And
to top it all off, the food was good too.

Last one: the Viceroy of India. It was empty. We went in, and drank beer and ate
curry. Tasty curry.

One of the girls

One of the girls in our office had a really bad attack of the hiccups this afternoon, so much so that all of the office resorted to trying to find a way to make her stop. The usual suggestions were made “Hold your breath”, “Drink water slowly” etc. but the one that worked was a new one on me. Julia walked up to her with a ten pound note in her hand and said “I’ll give you this if you hiccup again”. She didn’t. It was quite amazing really.

Yesterday morning at 11am

Yesterday morning at 11am, England (and most of Europe) stopped for a 3 minute silence. I was at work and we all gathered on the 3rd floor and stood, heads bowed and reflected on the events of Tuesday (although to be honest, we’ve talked or thought about little else since it happened). On Tuesday afternoon, we had the radio on, a tv on further down the office, and mostly spent the afternoon getting all the information we could, always hoping that it was a mistake, or an exageration, or something, anything but that. It’s something that I think will take everyone a long time to come to terms with.

Our thoughts are with those who have lost loved ones, friends, colleagues and also those who have been working so hard to look for survivors.

ve just been out

I’ve just been out and bought a new gadget. I’m replacing my stolen Visor Deluxe with a Handera 330. The Handera has a lot of improvements over the Visor Deluxe, in the form of a higher resolution screen, a software grafitti area, a jog dial, a microphone which works (the Visor has one that does nothing). I’m sure to be spending the next couple of days playing with it, and adding lots of programs to it.

still reading Neil Gaiman

I’m still reading Neil Gaiman’s blog every day and on Tuesday he talked about Fay Weldon and her new book “The Bulgari Connection” which is sponsored by Bulgari, and contains “product placements” (the first time this has been done in a novel apparently). Neil comments on it, giving a bit of a background on it before going on to say:

Personally, I think it’s a triffic idea, and would like to announce that any manufacturers of fine fountain pens who want to get plugged in the text of the next novel should just drop me a line. And a sample fountain pen or two. Also people selling small south sea islands — I will happily plug your south sea island sales company in my next novel in exchange for a small island of my own.

Well, it made me chuckle anyway.

It gone … the

It’s gone… the pelmet has gone. And it didn’t do too much damage to the walls or ceiling. So, we now have a 7 foot long pelmet in our loft. We’re thinking of putting it onto Ebay and seeing if anyone wants it.