Michael Harling's Blog

Today I went to the Cuckfield Bookfest, and it confirmed for me something that I have been thinking about for the past few months. But first, the Bookfest.

We went to see Lucy Mangan in a Q&A with Ana McLaughlin. Lucy is an author, columnist, features writer and TV critic for The Guardian, and an opinion writer for i news. Ana McLaughlin doesn’t seem to have a Wikipedia page that I can copy. However, someone with a similar name is a former member of the US Army Special Fo...

On Monday we went to Tobermory, a fishing village set up by the Scottish Government about two hundred years ago, so it’s not that old. I think they told us why the houses were painted those bright colours, but I can’t remember, and I can’t be arsed to look it up.

What I do know is that Tobermory was the backdrop for a kid’s TV show call Balamory. None of the people on the tour were young enough to remember the show, except for Ryan, the bus driver, so the town wasn’t as big a draw...

On Saturday, we went to Mull.

We travelled with a tour group (Brightwater), as we have done before, but this time there were minor differences: there were only a dozen people in the group, and all of them—except for me—were women. We were also the youngest members of the group, by some margin. However, all the ladies (bless them), even those with canes and walkers, were up for the challenge.

So, we drove. Pretty scenery, rest stop at Luss and lunch at The Green Wellie in the town of Tyndru...

On our final day in Glasgow, we visited the Kelvin Grove Art Gallery and Museum because, well, you really need to.

It is an amazing collection of art, sculpture, rare exhibits, and oddities, sorta like the Burrell collection, but in an olde Worlde building that, along with bags of “fading days of the Empire Charm,” holds a massive pipe organ. And every day at one o’clock in the afternoon, someone comes out and plays it. (Except for Sunday, that’s a...

A few weeks back, we bought new suitcases. The reason was, the nested set we had included four, two of which we never used. This seemed wasteful, so we gave them away and bought two new ones, both having the dimensions of the ones we had been using. Strangely, when we got them home, they seemed awfully big. So, I went back and bought the next size down, meaning we now have a nested set of three suitcases, one of which we will never use.

And this is why I went on a ...

The other day, while walking past the Skate Park, a notice painted on a wall caught my attention. It read: The Earth is Flat. And it opened my eyes.

I wish I could thank the brave rebel who risked an ASBO for daring to print the truth. I admit it has taken a while for me to see it, but after viewing a few TikTok videos, I was beginning to question this spherical earth thing, and that message pulled me into the light. The earth is so obviously flat. I mean, l...

The worst cup of coffee I have ever had—US or UK—was on the 3rd of September 2011. I know the date because it was so bad I took a picture.

It tasted just like it looks, but colder. It was weak, tepid, and terrible. And it was served in a Styrofoam cup because the café’s dishwasher was broken, so they couldn’t wash the china mugs. It was served to me at the Amberly Chalky Pits Museum’s Limeburners Café, something I would usually not reveal—in order to avoid embarrassing the establishmen...

For most of my working life, I was an IT professional. Ten years of retirement, however, have left me unprepared for dealing with today’s electronics.

If you care to refer to the previous post, you will see that, after several false starts, we finally sorted out our telly troubles. However, a week after the final fix was made, the telly simply stopped working.

Still convinced it was an antenna issue, I visited a local antenna expert and rel...

A couple of weeks ago, we bought a new telly, even though our old one was only two and a half years old. It wasn’t that it was out-dated or had stopped working, it was simply driving us crazy.

A few months after we brought it home, it began periodically turning off and needing to reboot itself (a process that could take as long as a minute and a half which, if you are in the middle of an episode of Shetland, is a long time). Additionally, it stopped recognizing our WiFi, which made it impossi...

On Sunday, the 6th of July, we had to get up extra early to catch the bus to Milan. We were told breakfast packs would be made available but, when we asked the desk clerk and the kitchen staff about it, they didn’t know what we were talking about. But, realizing our plight, they prepared … something.

We found out what that something was when the bus stopped for our “Picnic Breakfast” by pulling into a truck stop. It was all macadam and diesel fumes and articulated lorries...