little bits of everything

I'm reading The Unbearable Lightness of Scones  by Alexander McCall Smith (a great title), the fifth in the 44 Scotland Street series of novels. It was originally published in The Scotsman , each short chapter a day. I'm enjoying it immensely, more than the previous one , the first one in this series which I've read. I think it's partly because I'm more familiar with the characters, and also because I was slightly distracted by the blurb in the other book which mentioned a minor plot point which I waited for ages to arrive. I think the blurb writer, given the intertwined nature of the stories and the lack of major plot points, seized on something to mention which actually was one of loads of details in the life of a character. He writes in the introduction: The story has numerous plots; characters drift in and out; some matters are unresolved; strange things happen. In short, a serial novel is particularly well-suited to the depiction of the shape of real life,

When I was at the University of York I had a show on University Radio York  (aka URY). (This fact has earned me some cool points with my children.) I had two hours on a Saturday morning to fill. I found it quite hard to fill the show. If you wonder why, then try and think what it must be like to find 30 tracks you like, when you're only 20, and in the days before the Internet. One of the tricks I'd do was to find an album with a song I knew on it, play that song, and pick another half decent track on the same album - only one album to lug around then. Anyway, the reason I'm posting this is because out of curiosity at the weekend I thought I'd see if it was mentioned on wikipedia, and it was. Not only that, the picture above could almost be me. It was taken around the time I was there, I wore a cool jumper with shoulder pads like that (except mine had a zip down the front). The only way I could convince my children it wasn't me was by pointing out I don't like