£800 million a year!! That’s how much the UK is losing due to a poor knowledge of simple maths. According to a recent report by learndirect; ‘£823 million is lost each year due to inadequate basic skills – enough to pay the starting salaries of more than 40,000 new teachers. ‘ The most interesting results of their survey of 1000 people found: ‘One in five say they cannot convert local currency into pounds while on holiday; more than a third admit to adding up on their fingers when they have no calculator one in five do not know the difference

Having suffered from ‘man-flu’ over the weekend I had to return a ‘recovery dvd’. On the way to the rental shop I was stuck behind every possible learner, bad driver and hesitant decision maker. In my youth I would have fussed and fretted but this time I just made the resolute decision to relax, bide my time and once I’d dropped the dvd off, I got my bike out and went for a spin! To avoid any confusion it’s a 1200cc Suzuki. And despite the slight drizzle (which soon passed) and the wind chill, I was toasty and warm! These modern bike jackets

So the olympic games in London is (surprise, surprise) going to cost double the previoulsy estimated figure. Nearly £2Billion will have to come from lottery and public funds. Yipee… But when we talk about ‘billions’ what are we using? I read this news in the Sunday Times and I’m interested to know if they refer to a UK billion or a US billion? I may be behind the times and the whole world may have now adopted the US billion (which makes more Americans Billionaires by reducing the number of required ‘0’s by 3…) Historically a UK billion was 1,000,000

I should consider the location of my premises as quite fortunate. At least twice a month a mass exodus of avid football supporters pass by my window twice. The second event such as this since I opened up to the public and put displays in the window will occur between 19.00hrs and 22.00hrs this evening (31.01.07). This time the sign is bigger. This time there is a (removable) leaflet holder fixed to the window frame, populated with informative reading. (I’m thinking about putting something on them like a football related game so more people keep them….). This time, I will be out….

Tesco are building houses! Britians biggest supermarket chain plans to oversee the buildiing of 2000 homes in the next three years. A £400m scheme at Woolwich for over 900 houses will all be situated, yes, you guessed it, near a big, new store! It’s brilliant! Build houses and fill them with customers! Will they also have Tesco Expresses as local convenience stores? Will it be like a ‘Tesco Village’…..? Wouldn’t that be strange..!

I have recently made the decision to completely revamp my main website using the power of PHP and CSS. The site is currently mostly html apart from the ‘news’ section which is already using  a much more search engine friendly set up and layout. By revamping the site I intend to make the structure more straightforward for the SE’s to follow and in the process make any changes I think will enhance the user experience. The site is already over 500 pages in size and I’m doing this all myself so it may be a while before the finished site

An article in one of the weekend broadsheets has exposed 8 of the countries top 10 that have given both savers and borrowers the worst deal over the past three years. They have beed described as having ‘cynically manipulated interest-rate rises over the past three years to net millions of pounds in excess profit at the expense of saver and borrowers. Out of the top 10 in no particular order the following banks were referred to as ‘the bad guys’: HSBC, A&L, Northern Rock, Barclays, Halifax, Lloyds TSB, Abbey and NatWest. The ‘good guys’ were Nationwide and Brittania. The survey was

I’ve found some useful calculators to the site which are very straightforward and simple to use. I’ve used the BBC mortgage calculator a few times and recommended it to friends in the past so I thought I’d link to it on here for anyone to find. The credit card calculator gives you details of how much interest you will pay on a balance and how long it will take depending on how much you pay off every month. All the calculators are listed on the right of the page.

Weather conditions are extreme, the doomsday clock has inched closer to armageddon, (Yahoo answers has once again proven very few people have anything worthwhile or constructive to say on the subject – just uneducated stabs in the dark and random assumptions – am I being too harsh?), there are only 5 more years until 2012, TV keeps showing ‘best ever’ countdown shows as if there’s not going to be anything more to add and nature channels are telling us to ‘watch it now before it’s all gone’. Quite frankly it’s depressing but did we really think the human race was going to

But I really should get something to eat…