Do they cost £85 or 85p?
We were told at school never to mix currency units. Mind you, that was to stop the likes of £2/19/11d, so perhaps it's gone out of fashion now.
No, I don't know what a fern Christmas bow is.
The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:10am on Thursday, 5th February, 2026:
Weird
While up north, I saw this sign in a garden centre:
Do they cost £85 or 85p?
We were told at school never to mix currency units. Mind you, that was to stop the likes of £2/19/11d, so perhaps it's gone out of fashion now.
No, I don't know what a fern Christmas bow is.
10:01am on Wednesday, 4th February, 2026:
Anecdote
My younger daughter works in the village of Dedham, where tomorrow The King and Queen will be paying a visit.
Naturally, although most of the village is ecstatic about this, there are some residents who sense the opportunity to make a point.
Quite how Charles is protecting Andrew, or indeed how he even could if he wanted to, is not made clear.
The days when fliers didn't echo unsupported statements made on social media are disappearing fast.
8:09am on Tuesday, 3rd February, 2026:
Anecdote
Early February is not a good time for tourists to visit the seaside.
That said, our car was one of half a dozen parked facing the sea, so we could simply watch the waves breaking.
8:55am on Monday, 2nd February, 2026:
Anecdote
We're in Yorkshire today for a flying visit to see my stepmother. Our grandson has a cold that he caught off me, so let's hope she doesn't catch it off him.
Last week, her cat, Ronnie, was hit by a DPD delivery van and killed. He'd been a fixture here for over a decade, and every time we visited, there he was. It was weird realising that all the little habits we'd developed, like closing the bedroom door so he couldn't get in and sleep on the bed, weren't applicable any more. Even coming downstairs in the morning and looking to where he'd normally be eating his breakfast (or turning his nose up at it — both were equally probable), only to remember he wasn't there, was weird.
He was an old cat, and had a lot of health problems. He was going deaf, and that's probably what caused him to stick his head out between parked cars just as a van was going past. At least it was quick, though; he was declining, and could have endured a lot of suffering in his final months. Still, it was something of a shock.
My stepmother (she isn't the evil kind, by the way) is now having to adjust to life on her own. She has more freedom to travel but less company, and of course she misses Ronnie a lot. She's not intending to find a replacement, but the way it is with cats, they often find owners rather than the other way round.
I like cats, even though they're indifferent to me. Dogs, on the other hand, dislike me, but that's OK because I don't think much of them, either (except collies; collies and I have an understanding).
7:58am on Sunday, 1st February, 2026:
Weird
This headline in the Essex County Standard can be read multiple ways.
Does anyone want a snapped baby chimpanzee?
8:22am on Saturday, 31st January, 2026:
Anecdote
From this week's Essex County Standard on page 4:
Meanwhile, on page 20:
Clearly, norovirus is contageous.
9:08am on Friday, 30th January, 2026:
Anecdote
I bought some more playing cards.
These were cheap (£8.39 including postage), because they're not antique. This is all I knew about them when I bought them:
They're in a cellophane wrapper, so they can't have been earlier than the late 1930s; the tear-off strip probably adds some more years to that. However, I thought they looked pretty so I went for it.
Naturally, I took off the wrapper. I wasn't buying these as an investment, so didn't care about it. I wasn't disappointed by what I found inside:
The 10 of Clubs told me that the cards were manufactured by Coeur, which is a brand used by Altenburger Spielkarten Fabrik, a German company now owned by Carta Mundi of Belgium (as are so many other old manufacturers).
The faces, particularly on the queens, looked as if they'd been modelled on real people, so I was a little concerned that I'd bought a deck based on well-known East German actors or something. That turns out not to be the case, though. It's a Coeur Salon-Karte no. 66, made in 1968, presumably for the UK or US market.
Anyway, although it's more recent than what I typically buy, the cards are both unusual and pretty, and constitute a nice addition to my collection.
9:02am on Thursday, 29th January, 2026:
Weird
Marks and Spencer have this catchphrase they want us to associate with them. "This isn't just <product>: it's M&S <product>".
They've eased off on it in recent years, largely because people use it when M&S screw up. "This isn't just an Internet security issue: it's an M&S Internet security issue".
That hasn't stopped them from putting up signs like this in their stores:
The white lettering on the black background makes it look like a protest message, telling us the food isn't just.
No Fairtrade designation for your food, then, M&S!
8:34am on Wednesday, 28th January, 2026:
Weird
I don't know why the makers of these baby wipes decided to draw grass on the packaging, but did they have to make it look as if the baby has claws?
8:27am on Tuesday, 27th January, 2026:
Weird
These people in Colchester still have their Christmas lights up. Lots of people leave their external lights up all year round, because they can't be bothered to take them down; these people are different because they leave them switched on.
If they take them down on February 2nd (Candlemas), either they're minority Christians or they're majority Christians born pre-16th Century.
I guess they could also be non-Christians messing with passers-by.
10:18am on Monday, 26th January, 2026:
Anecdote
After three weeks, I've finished replaying Elder Scrolls Online, having last finished playing it in September 2019.
It hasn't really changed a lot. There's new content, although acquisition of experience points and the like has been speeded up so you whisk through and miss a great deal. I started a new character, but experimented on a build that didn't work out so gave up on it after maybe a week. I began another one, for for which it took me two weeks to reach the level cap and garner a slough of champion points.
As usual with Bethesda games, none of this actually matters because of the dynamic difficulty adjustment. Mudcrabs take just as long to kill at level 50 as they did at level 5. By the time you have a decent set of skills slotted, every fight is the same and therefore boring.
The stories associated with the quests are usually good in principle, but in practice they all involve very similar activities. 90% of them are: : go to these nearby places, where you'll need to kill the mobs that are guarding the thing you have to click on, then after you've clicked on all the things, come back here. If you're in a dungeon, the boss will be in the furthest room from the entrance, so either run through the trash along the way or do the sub-quest that you'll come across early on. If the boss isn't an end boss, expect it to tell you "you're too late" to stop the end boss.
There was a lot of activity in the chat logs, most of which was guild-related. Not every guild that was trying to recruit was German or Russian. The first three invites I saw in English were for LGBT guilds. I didn't join a guild, anyway, as I knew I wasn't going to be playing for long. I don't think anyone talked to me directly, but it's hard to tell when the chat box is packed with plaintive five-line requests for gawd-knows-what that no-one reads.
They still haven't fixed the quest-tracking problem, whereby you're in the middle of a quest chain, complete the link and are given the next one, only to find the currently tracked quest is now one in a different zone entirely. Maybe there's a setting that makes it less prevalent or something, but if so that should be the default setting.
Overall, ESO in 2026 is an improvement on ESO 2019, but it has the wrong focus. Its main strength is its stories, but you're zipped through these to reach some tiresome elder game that assumes you want to spend your time in groups repeatedly running limited content.
I confess that I do feel an urge to replay Skyrim after this, though.
9:28am on Sunday, 25th January, 2026:
Comment
In the Hans Christian Anderson story, The Emperor's New Clothes, everyone knows the emperor is wearing no clothes. They go along with the pretence that he is, because they don't want to be thought of as stupid. Only when a child points out that he's wearing no clothes does the façade collapse.
Pretty well every politician knows that the current president of the US has some form of dementia. Our leaders go along with the pretence that he doesn't, because they don't want their country to be in for a pounding. All it would take is for one leader, speaking on a world stage, to say openly what everyone can see and no-one will have to pretend any more.
Someone could have done this at the Davos meeting earlier this week, but they didn't.
My guess is that every politician also knows that the man will die soon, so they just have to wait it out.
8:42am on Saturday, 24th January, 2026:
Weird
My instincts tell me that most vehicles turn right at this junction.
I should have been a detective.
9:01am on Friday, 23rd January, 2026:
Weird
Two sections of wall on this building in our village have numbers on them.
I've no idea why they have numbers on them, they just do.
I always thought that on the whole, bricks were mutually interchangeable. These non-fungible bricks suggest otherwise.
8:56am on Thursday, 22nd January, 2026:
Weird
Here are a couple of signs I saw recently:
The first one is saying "we would prefer you not to ((smoke or eat) in this store)", although it can also be read as "we would prefer you ((not to smoke) or eat) in this store", and only the use of large upper-case letters prevents "we would prefer you (not to smoke) or (eat in this store)".
Because parentheses aren't used this way in regular English, a better way of putting it would be: "in this store, we would prefer you neither to smoke nor to eat".
The second sign is saying "please (do not obstruct entrance) and (keep lane clear)", but again, it can be read a different way:"please do not (obstruct entrance and keep lane clear)".
In the first sign, the "not" applies to the entire clause, but in the second sign it only applies to the first term of the clause. It's only because we know that signs typically tell you not to do things you might other wise do that we can divine their meaning.
Perhaps Boolean logic should be taught more widely in British schools.
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).