The best coffee shop in Manchester has closed. The scale of this tragedy cannot be overstated: it is roughly on par with every person in our office having their arms cut off. Looking out of the window and seeing those shutters covering the doorway near brings a tear to my eye.

More at Manchester Confidential and The Guardian.

Music in Britain is totally broken, and it’s all iTunes’ fault. Because each download of an individual track counts as a ‘single’ purchase, it counts towards the singles chart (but only if the tracks are purchased individually rather than as the whole album), every single track off the new Arctic Cockmonkeys album looks set to enter at least the top 75 this week. More at The Grauniad.

I hope you’re all thoroughly ashamed of yourselves, people of Britain. You’ve killed music. Well done.

This is a hell of an article.

I agree with him about “In Christ Alone”, though 🙂

Well, we had an offer accepted, and we’re now up to our eyeballs in solicitors and estate agents and mortages and all that lot. But yes, it’s quite exciting – a nice refurbished three bed semi with a garden and a proper brick shed. I’m even going to be allowed to build a pizza oven in the garden, apparently, assuming local hoodies don’t kick it over as soon as I’ve made it. So, hooray, yes.

So, it seems Parcel Force have an amazing new service whereby instead of, say, actually trying to deliver a parcel, they now don’t even bother leaving the depot and instead just send you a second class letter to tell you to go and pick it up from a post office that is nowhere near where you live. Hey, thanks for that, it means I have to go miles out of my way to get my parcel a week after it was meant to be delivered. Now that’s what I call service.

The pictures are still scanning, but having got the slides from the weekend back, I can confirm that (a) I still love film, and (b) Velvia 100 is just as crazy-go-nuts hyper-saturated bonkers as Velvia 50. Which is awesome.

We went to Wales last weekend, climbed a hill, saw some birds, failed to find some rabbits and went to Portmeirion. There’s some pictures, including a nice panorama of Portmeirion. Yes, I know it’s not Easter until this weekend, but Wales is from the future.

(the subject of this post is an unbelieveably geeky joke about Portmeirion; I was going to take a photo of myself holding a sign with that on it in Portmeirion but forgot; also, I didn’t want to have to explain it to anyone who asked what I was doing)

I also took a load of pictures on that new Velvia 100 slide film; I’m still waiting for those to come back from Peak, so we’ll see how they turned out.