Just back from TJHughes in Sutton. I had a very good experience with their online shop this past Christmas and then in their Watford shop earlier this year.

Having been scouting for a good deal on a memory foam mattress I spoke at length with the staff in the Watford shop and identified a product I liked. It's a bit far to bring the family from South London so this morning, with much to do, and dealines looming, we took time out to troop down to Sutton to have a lie-down for a bit on the mattress we thought we wanted. ...read more

The Metropolitan Police is an august British Institution. The first organised and duly constituted police force in the world, the Met has a sterling reputation in Britain, and around the world, for fairness and effectiveness, and its officers are the only police force in the world to do their duties unarmed as a matter of course (although there are, however, armed officers on standby to deal with events that require armed force). Ian Blair is the Chief commissioner for the Metropolitan Police and is the leader of an organisation that has been unfortunately caught out behaving in a way that belies its history and reputation, particularly its reputation amongst the people of London. ...read more

I’ve been following Michael Palin’s programme on Eastern Europe on the BBC (look for “Palin” in the text about halfway down - his description is superb!) and tonite he went to Bulgaria and Turkey. The Bulgarian odyssey was interesting but the thing that really caught my eye was the last of the programme when he travelled to Cappadocia in Turkey to the site of the volcanic caves where some of the most prolific and influential church fathers hid before Christianity was made acceptable within the Roman Empire. Towards the end, after a lovely visit to a world-famous belly-dancing studio he went to have dinner in a local restaurant. ...read more

I stopped into TK Maxx (TJ Maxx for Americans) tonite. It had been a while. My how things have changed. Time was TK Maxx had good gear with brand names for half or less what the High Street did; it provided value for money for fashion conscious shoppers who wanted the look but didn’t have the wallet. All that has changed.

I didn’t twig till I heard a woman shopping with a couple of blokes who said, “Oh you don’t want that - that’s very Primark!” The bloke, a bit embarrassed, fluffed it by saying, “But I like Primark!” Sigh…

You see this is in no way a post to put down Primark; much the opposite in fact! ...read more

We’ve recently noticed that Lee is rubbish at blogging. The thing is, blogging is meant to be stream of consciousness comments that reflect one’s worldview on a visceral level. Lee, however, thinks about things and writes long tomes about the topic which tend to reflect more of a journalistic motif than the consensus blogging format. To be fair, in practice, blogging seems, in most cases, to be psychotherapy without the expense and hassle of a trained psychotherapist. It’s often the world-as-my-counsellor attitude which merely reflects the narcissism of many people who live in modern societies. Here at alley.me.uk we want to avoid that and mke the site something interesting, and worth visiting, rather than a crutch for the authors’ lives and pretensions.

But enough denoument; first things first. ...read more

We’ve just posted on the family site about what we’ve been up to. What is noticeably absent is any development on this site. This is about to change. Far from the shallow, tepid offerings of the wordpresses and movable types of this world, our content mgt system has some real horsepower and some very cool stuff it can do. We’ve just upgraded it for all our sites across the board so I hope to introduce some new stuff soon.

Additionally, I’ve had no inspiration on design but have already become really tired of the second hand, rusty auto that is this site’s design. I have some ideas but will put it out to the community first: have you seen something incredibly cool that could bear trying here? Click the comments link and tell us about it. We may jus ...read more

We’ve been busy; very busy so sorry for the lapse in content. Anyway, I would really, really like to know what’s wrong with Lambeth council? We phoned in a complaint about building works being carried out by the arrogant git next door and heard nothing. Eventually a letter arrived 10 days later stating they had called to follow up but our number was out of service. It appears the woman wrote it down incorrectly. I phoned and left a message correcting the information and waited for a reply. Bad move. The incompetence of front-line staff sometimes knows no bounds. ...read more

A friends of mine worked at Marks and Spencer’s Croydon shop but was fired not long ago. He deserved it as he had stolen a £7.99 bottle of rum and was recorded by the shop CCTV system in the act. When asked about it he held his hand up to the deed, apologised, paid for the bottle and took his due. So far nothing to say. ...read more

Looking at the access logs I noticed I had the site permissions tuned a bit too tightly. Site search is now available for anyone to use to search content current and historical.

I believe a contact page is the next page to put on the site.

First though, all web assets have to be monetised as the time for doing all this isn’t free, thus the introduction of Google Ads on the right hand side.

On the left we’ve added a recent blog posts column to give a quick synopsis of what’s been added lately.

Finally a logo has been added to the top. Comments on what should be done next (or what should be [or have been] done differently) can be added to the site. Simply register and you can add your two pennies worth.

Last week we got a letter through the door. It looked official; well sort of. It didn’t have the brown-envelope look of the On Her Majesty’s Service or the green Parliamentary logo that a Member of Parliament would send with an official letter of some sort in it. No this one was in a white envelope but when opened, produced a letter that at first glance appeared to be from Keith Hill, MP for Streatham, and Minister of various sorts over the years in Tony Blair’s cabinet. [img_assist|nid=26|title=Labour letter|desc=|link=url,http://www.alley.me.uk/files/labour_letter.tif|align=right|width=108|height=150] ...read more