Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

I’m curious: has a piece of music ever made you laugh? Out loud? Certainly music can suggest humour – and is often used to that effect in plays and films – but can it be funny for the sake of it? Music certainly elicits emotions: it can excite us and soothe us, make us feel optimistic [...]

Yesterday I met Fiona Joseph, an interesting lady who has written and published a book about Beatrice Cadbury. ‘She’s written a book about who?’ Yes, I don’t remember hearing of her either, and I was brought up a Quaker. Beatrice Cadbury was a Cadbury heiress who, it seems, took her principles in a different direction to her [...]

Every so often I find myself in an unexpected and memorable situation. Today, 1 February 2012, I am reminded of the time I met Umar Ghuman. I was traveling home to Birmingham on a Virgin train – not something I do often – and I sat at a table with a couple of Pakistani men. [...]

I was pretty sure the song’s title was also that of a sitcom starring Geoffrey Palmer and Judi Dench, so I could easily have Googled it. But that felt like admitting early defeat, so I closed my eyes and tried to remember. A tried and tested trick (by me, at least) is to run through [...]

On the train this morning I had with me my laptop, iPhone, Flip video camera and Zoom audio recorder. But my brain wanted pen and paper: why? It wasn’t that I couldn’t use what I had, but that in order to get my thoughts out of my head relatively intact my brain needed another conduit. The thing [...]

Yesterday my iPhone stumbled upon a wireless network with a very vulgar name. It made me think: if someone found that offensive, could the owner be charged with public indecency? It’s a curious (albeit pretty boring) question: because the network owner would, I suspect, presume that their wifi name is confined to the privacy of [...]

I keep telling people how my life has altered since using Twitter, even though I’m well aware of how sad that sounds. The thing is it’s not really about Twitter at all, but about people: all Twitter did was help me find them. This post will appear particularly self-indulgent: it’s trying to articulate something that [...]

This is a bit scary: a man who had been ordered not to contact his wife was jailed when he inadvertently sent her a message on Facebook. He claims the sign-up process confused him—in the same way that it confused me—by sending automatic friend requests to people in his existing contacts lists. “I certainly hadn’t [...]