I’m not sure if you have seen or played “The Crimson Room” before…but when I first played this puzzle game, a few years ago, I drove me totally INSANE!!! I remembered about it over the weekend and thought I would be so kind as to share it with you too! (click on the picture to play..)

If you are indeed a glutton for punishment, there is also “The Viridian Room” and “The White Chamber” to challenge your Harry Houdini escapism skills…

Enjoy….(or search Google or You Tube for escape solutions…..)

Ahem. I would just like to take this blogging opportunity to apologise for the 800,000,000,000,006 emails that Mac Mail has just sent out on my behalf.

You see, when I told Mac Mail to set up an Auto Response to incoming mail, it decided that – just to be sure – it would send an Auto Response message to EVERY SINGLE message in my inbox.

So, I’m sorry, and I’m sure I will be punished justly for this error. Particularly by Ben Greenhalgh who has received back the 70+ bizarre love letters he has sent to me during my tenure at Cuckoo.

So, once again… sorry. And have a nice day.

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So another Premier League season is almost upon us & recently I’ve already experienced the highs & lows of being true Claret and Blue.

Fortune's always hiding...

These pictures perfectly capture how the club you love can get it so right & then so wrong. Firstly every fans dream is your manager holding up a shirt with your name on. This was taken from a very clever bespoke email reminding me to renew my membership at West Ham. But this flattery was soon undone by the launch of this season’s home shirt! OMG what on earth is this monstresity? Call me old fashioned but West Ham shirts are meant to be pretty much claret with blue sleeves & what’s those checks all about. Ray Winstone’s face says it all… Umbro, who have managed to give Man City a really cool retro-inspired shirt, have proper mugged us off!

Dear Britney,

Firstly, let me explain that I’m not a fan of yours. To me, you’re not particularly talented, or interesting.

Britney in Manchester, maybe.

So, just when I think you’re returning to your robo-Britney hey-day, knocking out the hits, dying the hair blonde, having nothing interesting to say – you wow me with another ingenious scheme.

This time, on your British arena tour, you decide, quite cleverly, to charge people loads of money for the tickets, and then – blamo! You straight-out refuse to sing! You simply mime badly and flop around the stage, dry-humping things! Excellent!

And also, when you greet a crowd of 16,000 fans in Manchester, you let them know exactly how much you cared by saying: “What’s up, London?” – like some demented Bugs Bunny. Fantastic!

Sincerely,

Stephen Fairbanks.

As anyone who has ever moved home can tell you, it’s a traumatic time. Not only to have to find a way to lug all your earthly belongings from one point A to point B (in tact, hopefully, and without permanent damage to your spine) you also have to (and this is the REALLY annoying part) inform every company in the world you’ve ever had custom with of your new address. DVLA, Banks, magazine subscriptions… Tesco Clubcard… now, with the miracle of the internet, you’d think all this would be a breeze, fill in a few forms here, hit a few ‘send’ buttons there. Done.

BT - Connecting People

Only, if you’ve just moved into a new place – you won’t have internet connection. You won’t even have a phone line. Instead, you have to spend a heartbreaking amount of money calling companies on your mobile phone. This wouldn’t be so bad if customer service departments, who deal with hundreds of calls every hour, weren’t so astronomically incompetent. And sitting supreme in their throne of ineptitude has to be British Telecom.

BT, will quite gladly keep you on hold for 15 minutes while they figure out how to use a keyboard, ask you to ‘confirm the first line of your address and postcode’ a good 3 or 4 times (each call), and then, after spending a further 5 minutes taking all your bank details to set up a direct debit, will inexplicably cancel your order and won’t even think to LET YOU KNOW. Not only once will they do all this, they’ll do it all THREE TIMES. And when you phone back and sit through more soothing (irritating) hold music, you’ll have to explain the situation AGAIN only to be promised to be called back by someone who has half a clue… only this will NEVER, EVER HAPPEN.

If I suffer a massive heart attack within the next week or so, do you think they’d give me a discount? Probably not, no.

Getting to know all about you…

In recent days I’ve got to find out more about my local MP – David Cheater (sorry Chaytor) Bury North, than I ever expected and indeed until now cared about. Whilst I’ve been forgetting to engage in the political process, ‘Our Dave’ has been suspended for claiming nearly £13k on a mortgage he forgotten he’d already paid off. Something he described as “an unforgivable error in accounting procedures”.

Maybe I should’ve cared more & based on the almost daily revelations, that might be a lesson we’ll all learn?! But I didn’t vote for him you see, fact is I didn’t vote for any of them.

Energy-saving bulb - good ole Dave!

So maybe I’ve got to come to terms the fact that I’m (& people like me) also part of the problem. Arguably it’s our apathy & complacent, relative affluence that has helped let them get away with it. As it’s uncomfortable being too hard on myself, in turn I ought to consider not being too hard on him. Surely it’s understandable that you’d get so confused about where your home was that you’d ‘flip’ between Todmorden & Westminster six times.

Who couldn’t sympathise with his apparently bewildering “changing and complex family circumstances”. Today I’ve seen photos of both his beautiful, stone rural-retreat & the modern London tower block – let’s face it, we all might get confused too.  But it’s this particular shot that really caught my attention & finally got me engaged. That energy-saving light bulb outside the substantial Todmorden cottage has reassured me that, after all he really does have all of our best interests at heart!

Clearly he’s a lot more Green than I thought & unfortunately for him, after all this, we aren’t.

It’s weird and depressing – the realisation that
there’s nothing in life that can’t be sold as
a commodity to the media by Max Clifford.
Teenage pregnancy, cancer, death: wherever there’s
a fee for the protagonist (and their publicists)
and extra sales for the tabloid, there’s a way.
You look at the newspapers and just don’t know
what’s real, what’s a PR stunt and what’s a scam.
And just when we thought it couldn’t get any
worse, a real bombshell hits us: Cheeta the
Chimp, the 86 year-old ex-movie star with the
best-selling autobiography and the range of art
work (one of which graces our walls) is a fake!

Writer R D Rosen thinks the chimp’s late
trainer Tony Gentry passed off “Cheeta” as a
star. There were, in fact, many different chimps
who played Cheeta and in movies like Dr Doolittle.
“Cheeta” was not born in 1932 but around 1960,
never performed in films, but performed as a pier
attraction in Santa Monica. So what was the
main giveaway for Rosen between movie Cheeta
and “Cheeta”? “The ears were different”.(c 2009 popbitch)

Well, I could, if I had them in my possession.

Wooden knitting needles that is…the ones I ordered over a week ago. I had hoped that they would have arrived by the time it came to writing this post…. clearly not and I am most displeased…

Taught by my dear old departed grandma some 20 years ago, I have just recently taken up the art of knitting again following the birth of my son 6 months ago. I was keen to stick to old ideals of putting him in cotton nappies and dressing him in wool.

You’re not the 1st to question, “aren’t you a bit young to be knitting?… is that not the past-time of the over 60’s…your grandmothers/or indeed mothers or elderly aunties.?!?” Well, no and you have just committed a big, blundering faux pas.

My esteemed male colleagues in the studio were somewhat un-impressed when I divulged my recent post topic to them late on Tuesday afternoon -  knitting has indeed got a bad cred. Why?! when some of the most popular, iconic celebrities are said to be picking up the sticks? …let me name but a few: Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Kate Moss even Sarah Jessica Parker.

The studio boys may scoff now but shame on them when I finally complete and showcase the green Mohawk hat for my brother-in-law’s next snowboarding trip…

He would have received it for his Christmas present as requested, had I not been already knitting my son his very own lil’ red devil hat…

Updates to follow re. my needles…