mostly david ephgrave

It may be a symptom of feeling a little rundown and sorry for myself, but listening to a random Oasis song this morning surprised me by hitting me right in the heart. The song was 'Don't Go Away' from their overblown 1997 album, 'Be Here Now'. I don't even know why it entered my head as it wasn't a big hit and, if anything, comes across as a little generic. But, for whatever reason, I requested it via everyone's favourite spy-in-the-room, Alexa, and, within minutes, I was blubbing like a Daily Express reader who's just seen a photo of Princess Di. Or George Osborne at Thatcher's funeral.  Okay, I may be exaggerating, but it moved me, even though it was probably the germs talking. Oasis are an odd band for me as there was a time when I was really liked them. They appeared on the scene when I was a guitarist in a group at school and somehow made being in a rock band seem viable again. But my love for their music faded quickly, and now, most of thei...

Tonight, I experienced a Pizza Hut Ice Cream Factory for the first time. To be honest, Factory is a bit of a misnomer, when it's just a small lever attached to a hole-in-the-wall. It’s akin to drawing ice cream out at a cash machine, if ATMs did such a thing. My wife went first, to show me how it was done, which turned my inexperience to fear. I wasn’t prepared for the Generation Game atmosphere to the whole thing, nor for the fact the Ice Cream ‘Factory’ has been calibrated for the right-handed dessert eater, which left me with the wrong hand doing the swirly swirly motion to catch the Mr Whippy-style ice-cream as it curled out into the bowl. If you’d asked me before tonight, I would never have anticipated a word of my previous sentence, but there you have it; what happens in Pizza Hut changes lives. The way the Factory was embedded into the wall made me feel suspicious; what goes on on the other side?: Is there a genetically-modified ...