There’s a story in the papers here in the UK about a girl who was put in prison in Florida for telling the security people at Miami Airport who were screening her luggage to “be careful, because I have three bombs in there.”

From what I gather from the reports, the security guard, seeing that this was a very white, very middle class and very British (not to mention apparently very stupid) girl, pretended not to hear and asked her to repeat herself.

Now you and I at this point (forgetting for the moment that you and I wouldn’t have been daft enough to get to this point in the first place) would have realised that we’d done something a bit daft and would have shut up.

But did the woman in question shut up?

No. She repeated herself not once but twice. And wonders why she went to prison.

Sorry – haven’t written for a while, because I’ve been busy. It’s quite good actually – I’ve never really had a job where I’ve been busy all the time before. In Sweden and Singapore I spent a lot of time sitting on my thumbs, to be frank – although I did get VERY good at Midtown Madness 2.

We have a flat now in Leeds, which is OK – it’s rented, because we’re not really familiar with the area and so we need to have a proper look round before we buy anywhere. It’s not very big – firstly because it’s cheap and secondly because I don’t want to be too comfortable or we’ll never move. But it’s clean and in a nice area and new – and there’s next to no chance of stumbling into the kitchen first thing in the morning and being squared up to by an 8cm cockroach like there was in Singapore. Which will be nice.

What else will be nice will be being reunited with our stuff, some of which we haven’t seen for more than two years. It’s been in storage since we left Stockholm in 2001, so I expect there will be quite a few things we have that we’ve forgotten about.

Bad habits I picked up in Asia:

1. Leaving the whole basket of supermarket shopping on the conveyor belt and expecting the checkout girl to unload it, scan it and pack it
2. Using exclamation marks in copy. They’re almost compulsory in Asia, but not really the done thing here
3. Using the word “rewarding” – although I’ve managed to avoid “indulge”, which is the first refuge of the Asian copywriting scoundrel.

Hooray! Have a new job!

Started yesterday at the agency I've been freelancing at for the last few months in Leeds.

Now all I have to do is find somewhere to live...

Sorry - Had a bit of a trauma with the template, so things should be back to normal soon...

I got a DAB digital radio from my lovely wife for Christmas. Apart from the fact I can now get my favourite AM radio station in crystal clear quality, the best thing about it is that you can now get the BBC world service in the UK without having to resort to short wave or t'internet.

I used to listen to the World Service a lot in Singapore (and if you'd heard Mediacorp radio you'd know why), and I'd kinda missed it.

The unique thing about the World Service is that you can turn it on and get absolutely anything - from the latest UK charts to the football to (on one memorable occasion) a documentary about the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel. I don't know about you, but I didn't know there was an Ethiopian Jewisj population in Israel, and I certainly didn't know they were interesting enough to make a 30 minute radio documentary about.

And that's the other fantastic thing about the World Service - it makes you realise that just about everything is interesting, provided it's presented in an informed, knowledgeable and compelling way.