Life
Ikea assembly service
My flat is full of Ikea furniture. And until now I’ve assembled it all myself. I’ve either had it delivered by Ikea themselves, or used one of the taxi vans outside the store to get it back. For my new Ikea PAX wardrobe I decided to get it assembled for me. The main reason is because of its size and weight. The wardrobe is 236cm high and [...]
Panmunjom, DMZ and seeing the North Korean border
Whilst on holiday in South Korea I went on a tour of Panmunjom and the demilitarised zone by the border of North and South Korea. There are lots of agencies running similar tours, and there are differences in what places you see on each tour. I booked about a month in advance via email for the ‘DMZ & Panmunjom’ tour run by the [...]
How to get rid of clothes moths!
In May 2008 I wrote my Clothes Moths Attack! post about my attempts to get rid of clothes moths in a friend’s home. It soon became clear that many other people were hard at work battling the seemingly indestructible clothes moths as many comments after comment started to roll in. After receiving over 100 reader stories about your attempts [...]
Air France VLML vegetarian in flight meals
After booking a long haul flight with Air France I used my booking code on the ‘Manage your reservation’ section of their website to try to select vegetarian VLML meals for my flights. Their website allowed me to select a vegetarian meal for one of the flights, but not the other. I therefore called up their customer services centre, and [...]
Stopping political junk mail
Junk mail is always annoying, there are many different types, and different steps are required to stop each type. Stopping junk mail is something I’ve previously written about, but if you want to stop political junk mail, or canvassing phone calls my previous advice won’t help you. If you are on the unedited electoral roll then the [...]
Wrist and arm pain when using a computer
Like many people who have to use a computer all day, every day, as part of their job, I find that I regularly get a painful or numb feeling in my wrists and arms. This is my story of what I’ve done to try to make that numbness and pain go away. I’ll add a usual disclaimer, pointing out that I’m not a medical expert, this is just personal [...]
My two months journey to get £10 Oyster refund
In January an Oyster card top-up machine managed to turn £20 of my cash into a mere £10 of credit. Here is the journey I had to take (bad joke alert!) to get them to give me my £10 back. Perhaps the best way to explain this one is to print the first complaint I sent to Oyster customer services via the contact form on the Oyster [...]
Cleaning kettle limescale with vinegar
If you have a kettle that looks like the photo below you might be dreading having to clean it. Trying to scrub limescale like this off the inside of a kettle is hard work if you don’t use the right cleaning product. Vinegar is a traditional solution used to get rid of limescale. I bought a 13p bottle of vinegar from Tesco to give it a [...]
Present and gift logging spreadsheet
Sometime it can be hard to think of what presents to give for birthday, Christmas, Valentines or anniversaries. Having a record of what presents you have given before can help to provide inspiration, and can help you avoid giving the same present twice. I’ve made a simple spreadsheet for logging gifts and presents. I’ve put some example [...]
Virgin Trains standard vs 1st class
When booking a recent two hour return train journey I spotted that I could take 1st class on the return leg for only £5 extra. I thought I’d give it a go to see if it is any better than standard class. The standard class outward journey If you are taking a Virgin Train from a London mainline station like Euston and are in standard class, [...]
