Freelance editor and proofreader
First, Swansea council mess up the translation of one of their signs: the Welsh says “”I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated”.
Now, English councils are banning everyday Latin phrases, like ‘vice versa’ and ‘via’.
It’s worrying, isn’t it?
Well, it’s nearly been three years coming, but finally BDO Stoy Haward have started paying out the monies owed from the Highbury ring-fenced fund.
A letter arrived in this morning’s post with a cheque for the full amount I was owed by Highbury for work on iCreate in January 2006. According to the letter, the trustees of the New Credit Trust applied to the court for an order confirming the beneficiaries; the court made the order on the 8th September and they’re now paying out.
Once the Trustees have completed all initial distributions, they will be contacting those parties who potentially have further Trust monies outstanding to them in order that they may prove whether their debt falls within the Trust period, which was from 12 December 2005 to 20 January 2006
Hopefully, everyone will get their cheques through soon then.
Finding the right gym is something of an artform. I’m not sure I’ve mastered it though. I spent a good week or so investigating the local gyms, ended up joining one in London Bridge and I’m not sure I made the right decision.
Virgin Active – Strand
Very nice. Very shiny. Lots of machines. Has a relatively small pool. Most of the free weights were available. Just hideously expensive, not quite as easy to get to for me as ones near London Bridge and the membership person wasn’t very helpful. You also have to fill out a whole lot of forms to even get a trial. Towel service extra. Men’s toilets were a bit nasty.
Fitness First – Beckenham
Good equipment. Good use of space. Helpful membership person. Towel service extra. Just a little bit soulless and very hard to get to by train and public transport.
Virgin Active – Bickley
Easy to get to if you’re going by train from Victoria, since it’s near Bickley station. Great facilities. Lovely pool. Massive number of machines and free weights, including the fabled power plates. Has a good café. Nicely priced too. If it had been better located, I would have joined this one (and still might).
Fitness First – Cottons (London Bridge)
The one I actually joined. Reasonably priced (compared to Virgin Active – Strand anyway). Has a smallish pool. However, it’s always busy; the front of counter staff and membership staff don’t seem to care; they messed up my health check-up booking so I never got it; the pool flooded the lower levels; I’ve been turfed out once because they were closing the gym at 3.00pm to connect it back up to the National Gird; almost all the doors have been taken off the men’s lockers (I don’t know why); they gave me someone to set up a training programme who had never used half the machines; and it closes at 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays (I was turned away at 5.30pm). And all that in only the last fortnight. Towel service included though.
Weather in London
Weather in Wales
What’s up there then?
It’s Shrove Tuesday today. Does it say something about me that I’m more excited by the thought of Pancake Day than I get about my own birthday?
Q: What are Santa’s little helpers called?
A: Subordinate Clauses
We went for a short weekend in November before the EuroStar switched over to St Pancras. Here are some piccies:
The Pompidou Centre from a couple of different angles
After quite a long break, I’ve spoken to Chris Coles of BDO again about progress on paying out on the ring-fenced fund to Highbury creditors. After admitting that paying out by Christmas last year was hopelessly optimistic, he now thinks BDO should be able to pay out within a couple of months. He says:
“Because of the way it was set up, it raised some complicated issues. At first view, it was simple and quick, but it’s just delayed it.”
There are still some technical issues to overcome to with tax liability and determining whether there are any separate classes of creditors, but BDO has definitely been appointed by the courts to deal with the issues.
Not sure how much to rely on that “two months” thing with Christmas coming up, but fingers crossed it won’t be too much longer now.
The observant among you may have noticed that I’ve changed web host. Goodbye Dataflame, hello LivingDot. Dataflame finally pushed me over the edge by locking down the permissions on my cgi-bin for a week while I was on holiday (without telling me) then locking them down again for two days while they did testing, simply because I was running Movable Type for this blog (and my other blogs).
LivingDot has the virtue of being a preferred partner of Six Apart, the company that makes Movable Type, and while the performance on their servers isn’t as good as Dataflame’s, the server occasionally times out on some requests and they’re a little more expensive, they have several advantages
The only hassles I had with the move was a couple of files that somehow got left behind; and problems getting my old MySQL databases copied over (leaving some strange characters on entries that used £s, “s, …s and Greek script). Otherwise, all is good and happy again.
I went to Cardiff in October and stayed on the bay for a few days. Here are a few shots, cos it’s a really lovely place – I can’t wait to go back!
