• Oh dear. What has happened with the writing on Coronation Street. It used to be so well written, well observed and genuinely funny.

    Now the police are involved in every other episode and violence is the order of the day. It’s almost like East Enders.

    Plots either occur way too fast, (Ashley’s vasectomy operation was fixed up in an afternoon without any counseling – I truly hope that is not possible in the real world) or way too slow -surely someone would have realised that David Platt is a psychopath by now?

  • Blue Pooh - or crushed beetles
    Blue Pooh – or crushed beetles
    I went for a walk in the Forest over the weekend, and came across what I think must be a pile of blue pooh. How can this be? Well, I think it is the waste matter from a creature that has been eating beetles. There seem to be a lot of beetles about too, several crossed my path on my walk.

    I’m not an infallible naturalist, but I think that these are the crushed exoskeletons of beetles that have either been regurgitated or poohed after the yummy insides have been absorbed.

    Nature blue in tooth and claw. I couldn’t say who the eater was.

  • X Factor has just started an there’s a piece of music playing with vocoded vocals.

    Can we throw these machines away now, please? They are like very bad photoshop filters, naff and overused.

    All the vocoder does is make everyone sound the same. Why, If you have a good and distinctive voice would you want to make it sound like everyone else?

    Glad to see the speedboats in the XFactor intro film. We saw them powering up the Thames at the end of July and figured that’s what they were for.