Dan McNeil's Blog

OK.  So it's not that late.  It's only half past eleven.  But it's late for me.  It's certainly later that I'm usually on the tube.  I know that London has a second "rush hour" around 11pm at night, but it's not something I experience all that often. But tonight I was out with some work people over in West London and I headed off at a sensible time to make my way across town.  One of the joys of living relatively centrally is that cabs don't break the bank. In all honesty I'm not out that often, and so getting a cab home from the centre of town is so rare it's affordable.  But not tonight.  Not all the way from Shepherd's Bush. So I plodded my way through West London, Google Maps guiding the way, and ended up at White City.  I jumped onto the Central Line and grabbed myself a seat.  The carriage was mostly full of people lying along the seats, half asleep.  But opposite me was a guy with a funky hair cut eating a bar of chocolat...

The company I work for (well sort of) has been sending out emails recently with the subject "Expect the Unexpected" and just containing a photo of something supposedly unexpected. One of the photos, for instance, was a young girl standing next to a tin of blue paint having daubed the walls.  Unfortunate, perhaps - but certainly not unexpected, surely? Life is full of unexpected things.  Almost every day contains something you didn't know was going to happen. And that's what makes life great.  Well one of the things.  Béarnaise Sauce is another thing which makes life great.  Anyway, I digress. The other morning I was on the tube on the way to work and there was a guy opposite me.  Probably around 40 years old, he was a portly chap with stubble and a mess of unkempt hair. He was wearing earphones which were leaking sound so I could hear the tinny distant sound of a voice.  That voice was Susan Boyle.  Singing "I Dreamed A Dream".  The guy...

It's nearly two years since the UK General Election result which left much of the country scratching their heads, thinking "what now?".  For the living memory of most of the people watching the results come in, UK General Elections delivered a clear winner.  Either the Tories or Labour would win the election and plod away with their own brand of policy for four or five years and then the whole process would be repeated.  An election which didn't give such a clear winner felt, to many people, unsatisfactory.  It felt as though there was unfinished business. That business unravelled over the following few days.  The Tories had won both the most votes and the most seats, followed by Labour and then the Lib Dems a way behind them.  The maths was such that Tories plus Lib Dems would be enough for a majority in the house; Labour and Lib Dems would give a total greater than the Tories but not enough for an overall majority. Just under a week after the electio...