A meal is more than just fuel for the body

It is an opportunity to share and chat and enjoy.

This last week has seen us give the M&M corporate mission "To eat, drink and have a good time" a thorough workout:

• Last Friday we met up with brother Ian and his partner Sarah for an excellent meal at our favorite italian restaurant - Enoteca Turi. Although I&S got married last September they have been together for a number of years and I am so used to saying "partner" I find it hard to switch to "wife" or "sister-in-law".
• Saturday we hosted Bron and Maggie for a Chateau Leoville dinner party. We had a bottle of 1982 Leoville-Poyferre and B&M a bottle of Leoville-Barton also 1982. So we had "compare and contrast" opportunity with two fine, mature clarets. And some excellent food to go with.
  
  Leoville-Barton 1982, Leoville-Poyferre 1982
  
• Sunday we cooked a traditional roast for our Danish house guests, who had arrived on the Monday, to give them a taste of traditional English cooking.
• Monday Mary went out for a team meal from work.
• Tuesday we gave our Danes a taste of traditional Scottish food with a Burns Supper. Unfortunately they were not convinced so it will be refried haggis for us at some point.
  
  Google Doodle Burns Night 2011
  
• Wednesday was Mary's birthday so we went to the wonderfully kitsch, Grade 2 listed Criterion Restaurant for a pre-theatre meal. That was followed by The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman at the inappropriately named Comedy Theatre - an excellent but intense play.
• Thursday we had the night off.
• Friday was meeting up in Glasgow with "the girls" - Mary's friends from Uni. We had an excellent meal at Guy's Restaurant in Candleriggs and a real good blether. We also treated ourselves to a stay in the refurbished Grand Central Hotel just a short stagger from the restaurant.
• Saturday no meal of note *but* we did meet up with fellow blogger and close neighbour of May's - Lynnette "Life with the Lusks" and husband Tommy for a coffee in Irvine. Always good to meet a cyber-chum in real life.
  
  Lynette and Tommy Lusk
  Lynette's blog post on our meeting: Saturday Coffee Time
• Sunday we plan a nice meal in - something we try to do every Sunday evening. A little quiet time together.

Monetising the blog

I was chatting to a colleague who also has a website and gets a similar number of hits as me - about 4,000 per month. I saw that he had Google Ads on his site and he revealed that it brought in several hundred pounds per year. Fair enough, so I thought I would do the same - hence the sudden appearance of a small block of ads in the right hand panel.

After two days my estimated earnings are a whopping £1.45 so that scuppers the early retirement plan. Still if it does bring in a few hundred quid each year that is better than a slap in the face with a wet kipper!

And just for Technorati - CWG9YEQPTNA8

Gullible's Travels migrated to blog.mmenterprises.co.uk

Gullible's Travels has moved to http://blog.mmenterprises.co.uk/. Please update your bookmarks.

My blog was previously hosted on my own website and not with Blogger. They are withdrawing support for FTP publishing and only allowing hosting on their own servers. Hence this enforced migration.

Now I need to make sure links to the old blog are successfully redirected to the new.

PS.
Setting up .htaccess in my public_html folder containing the following did the redirection very nicely thank you:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/(.*)$ http://blog.mmenterprises.co.uk/$1

The Persistence of Memory

Since about the age of fifteen I have kept a diary. Not so much "Dear Diary ..." more like "Went round to Bill's, played conkers".

I recently went up into the loft and came across my diaries from the early '80s when I was young, single and had a busy social calendar. When I read entries like "Drinks with Simon" and "Theatre with Caroline" I have to say I was thinking "Who the #~$* are Simon and Caroline?". Many of the names I recognised and am still in touch with but a scary number had sunk into the tar pit of time :-(

For a while I had a PDA - a Philips Nino - and that was my diary. When it eventually gave up the ghost I was left with 3 year hole in my memory. Now I have Gullible's Travels and it acts as off-site memory storage. It is like being able to Google my own brain to find out what I did and when!

So here is some spider food:

• Thursday, March 27, 2008 - Went to see the recording of Ready, Steady, Cook
• Tuesday, April 01, 2008 - Went to see Youssou N'Dour at IndigO2
• Saturday, April 05, 2008 - Hosted dinner party for siblings and partners
• Friday, April 11, 2008 - Went down to Farnham to give Mum some internet coaching

Sitting on a jury

and playing with my new iPhone. I am just over half way through my (expected to last) two week jury service. I shall write more when it is all over but it has been interesting to see the English legal system in action. Meanwhile this is a test of this new techo-toy's ability to blog.

I should point out that this was written while killing time in the waiting area prior to being called down to court. Of course phones have to be switched off whilst sitting and when you retire to consider your verdict they take your phone off you completely.

Blog Meeting 5

The best attended blog meet-up so far. About 22 members of "The London Bloggers Meetup Group" turned up to the Camel and Artichoke near Waterloo on Tuesday night. I drank a couple of glasses of very acceptable house red, talked to complete strangers and then went home.

It was a good choice of venue, the reserved tables upstairs gave us all room to sit comfortably. The people I spoke to were all suitably sociable - but then you wouldn't go to such an event unless you were, I suppose. They do food there which I will bear in mind for a future occasion. And it was very easy to hop on a train back to Wandsworth Town when came the time to leave.

Well done Andy for organising it.

For previous incarnations of this group see: "Blog Meeting 3"

Gullible's Travels has moved to http://www.mmenterprises.co.uk/blog/

My blog is now at http://www.mmenterprises.co.uk/blog/

My ISP's webserver has been down for over 10 days now (zoo.co.uk). Not impressive. I am glad I am not a customer running a business website. So I decided enough of using the free webspace that came with my account, after all you get what you pay for. So I moved my domain name to 123-reg.co.uk, bought a hosting package and re-uploaded my files. Well most of them, more to follow, some to reconstruct / recreate and some to edit the blog links for the pictures. Bear with me while I sort out the stragglers. Let's hope for a more stable future.

Now to catch up on the missed blogging...

Blood, Sweat and Tea

Real Life Adventures in an Inner-city Ambulance (Paperback) by my mate Tom Reynolds. Well, not really a mate but I did once buy him a beer in the Bell, Book and Candle.

The book, Blood, Sweat and Tea, is based on his blog Random Acts of Reality which is top of my blog reading. He has been doing all sorts of media interviews (mostly radio); here is one interview with Tom on the telly.

His blog is a gripping read about a real life job doing something of value. Not sure the same can be said of my desk-bound job. Read his blog and be reminded what a debt we to people like him in the ambulance service and get a fascinating insight into the (street) life of east London.

Well done Tom, congratulations on getting all the way to book form.

Blog meeting 3

London Bloggers Meetup Group:- May MeetUp

The group had gone dormant (see history below) but Jo from Tooting nobly stumped up the money to reactivate it. There had been a couple of previous meetups since that but this was the first I was able to get to.

Not so successful this one. Got to all-bar-one at 5 past 7 and was there for half an hour. Did three circuits of the place hoping for either 1) a sign or 2) for someone to spot a lost looking person. I accosted two groups asking if they were from meetup.com; felt sufficiently embarassed - sounds like a dating site for singles. At 7:40 got fed up and left.

Turned out I had got the details right it was just I was the only one to turn up. Oh well. Two future dates for your diary:

Britblog meeting Sunday 21-May-06 in Covent Garden:
• http://blog.britblog.com/2006/05/06/britblog-blogmeet-the-plan/
The London Bloggers June Meetup Tuesday 20-June-2006:
 • http://blog.meetup.com/357/events/4938749/
And a mailing List, UK Bloggers social:
 • http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ukbloggers-social/

Past history:
 • Tom Reynold sets up the London Bloggers Meetup Group
 • I go to a meeting
 • I go to another meeting
 • Tom steps down as chair

Blog meeting 2

Went to another Blog Meet yesterday. Unlike the previous Blog meet this had 10 pax rather than the previous 4 which made for a livelier meeting. They seemed mostly normal but then I would say that wouldn't I; I was there too! Not, as my wife suspects, all techno-geeks but a cross section of normal people. Some ate, all drank, all talked.

Compared to last time I drank less, went home earlier, woke up feeling more alert. Although that may also be thanks to Cleo not scrabbling on the laminate flooring at 2:30, 4:40 and 5:25 like the night before.

A small blog meet in London town

So there were just the four of us that turned up at the Bell, Book and Candle last night. Me, Tom, Andrew and Helene (the last being blocked by the company firewall, I wonder why?).

To quote a reviewer on the Beer in The Evening site: "Unique kitsch gothic pub in the heart of the city. Makes a drastic change from drinking in bars which look rather like ikea. " Rather like the all-bar-one next door, couldn't have put it better myself.

It was slightly strange meeting strangers, I was unsure of the etiquette for such events, what does one talk about? I presume one's blog and the others blogs are OK but how deeply does one probe for motives or reveal of one's own.

It contrasted with my previous web meetings off the Marc Bolan mailing list where we had conversed for so long we already knew each other well but just had not happened to be at the same locus in the time-space continuum.