The weekend has gone again, and so I'm back to my spreadsheets. Much fun for all, of course. The weekend itself was fine, though, if cold. Steph and I both did a fair amount of writing. I did about four pages of my Alexander short story. Steph did a couple of chapters of her novel. We watched About Schmidt on Sunday. It was a good movie, pretty disturbing and depressing in places, but I didn't think it quite worked in the end. It had the potential to be brilliant--there were lots of great touches--but I think the middle of it needed to be more solid and it could have worked towards a stronger ending. Still, I'd recommend it for a good evening's viewing for the things it does do right.

Other than that, we took a couple of nice walks down into the wooded valley nearby, went to the local pub for the first time (decent enough place, but a bit pricey and not much of an atmosphere), and just hung out. It was all over too soon.

England beat France in the rugby world cup, which was as satisfying as always. Australia beat New Zealand, which was satisfying too as NZ had been getting increasingly arrogant about their chances of winning the whole thing. I'm not much of a sports fan, but I like a bit of international rugby and cricket from time to time. Other than that, I'll leave it.

#

We in Britain are to be blessed by a visit by George Bush this week. Bush's minders want most of London made a no-go zone for the public during that week and want his goons to be allowed to shoot people they don't like the look of. Not surprisingly, this hasn't gone down terribly well over here. No one, not Tony Blur, not the pope, not anyone has ever tried such an over-the-top security operation. Even the right-wing magazine, The Spectator is unimpressed.

#

Today is marketing cock-up day. First, from the Guardian, a new curry sauce. Then from the BBC, new company names. The recent trend to taking well known company names that everyone recognises and replacing them with meaningless words has caused disaster throughout British business. Perhaps the most famous was the rebranding of The Post Office as consignia. Not surprisingly, nobody ever talks about going to consignia to post their mail. No doubt it all comes about by employing overpaid chief executives who don't have enough to do. As everyone who has ever worked in a big organisation knows, there's nothing worse than a manager who has nothing to do and wants to give the impression that he is doing something. For such people, change is synonymous with improvement. Or, at least, it obscures the lack of improvement for long enough for the manager to move on to his next job somewhere else.