Technology

I was exchanging emails with someone the other day and signed off with the sentence ‘let me know when you are next in London’ or words to that effect. It then occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea where in the world my correspondent lived. This interested me. Because it occurred to me that I could write the sentence ‘next time you are in London’ to more or less anyone in the world without it sounding ridiculous. Of how many other cities is that true? New York, certainly. But then it gets difficult. Paris or Singapore? Well, at a pinch. It wouldn’t work for Perpignan, say, or Bourton-on-the-Water.

When you buy a house in Britain, there is an extensive and well-established series of checks you must perform to ensure the property is suitable for habitation. When undertaking a survey, you should ensure that the boundaries of the property conform to those recorded at the Land Registry, and that the property does not lie on a flood plain or risk structural damage from coastal erosion or subsidence. Unfortunately, there seems to be no mechanism to protect householders from the worst possible eventuality — which is to find out that you have a lawyer living next door. Wherever you have a shared wall or fence, there exist countless opportunities to

I was at home enjoying an online episode of Tales of the Texas Rangers when my daughter interrupted me, wanting something on Amazon. Just to explain, Tales of the Texas Rangers was a 1950s NBC radio series featuring Joel McCrea as Ranger Jayce Pearson. There are 90 half-hour episodes available online. Once you tire of binge-listening to these, there are perhaps 200 more episodes of Dragnet and about 400 of Gunsmoke to choose from, the latter featuring the voice of William Conrad (detective Frank Cannon to anyone my age) as Marshal Matt Dillon. Yes, I realise it’s a bit weird using a fibre-optic broadband connection to listen to 1950s radio,

In 1929 John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2029 people in the developed nations could enjoy a perfectly civilised standard of living while working for 16 hours a week. His hope was for our precious hours of extra leisure to be devoted to such edifying pursuits as playing Grand Theft Auto and watching kittens skateboarding on YouTube. (Actually he didn’t predict that bit — he suggested we’d be listening to string quartets and attending poetry recitals but, hey, that was the Bloomsbury Group for you.) Today, however, not only has the work week stayed constant but, in direct contradiction of the theory, the better-paid now work disproportionately longer hours. In

Controversial I know, but I feel a little sympathy for Tomasz Kroker, the lorry driver jailed for ten years for causing death by dangerous driving; distracted by his mobile phone, he killed four members of the same family on the A34 by failing to notice that the traffic ahead had stopped. I don’t mean to say that he was not grievously at fault. First of all, he was using the phone in his hand. This is a doubly dangerous thing to do. Since you cannot brake fully until you have both hands braced on the wheel, the act of unhanding your phone adds around a second to your reaction time;

Do any of us honestly have any idea how serious the Hillary Clinton email scandal was? I haven’t got a clue. Her actions could have been a neglectful oversight or a heinous criminal act. We don’t know. Clinton was an avid BlackBerry user and, on becoming secretary of state, claimed she didn’t know how to handle email on the desktop computer the government provided. When the National Security Agency was unable to find a secure way of sending classified information via her BlackBerry, Hillary simply continued using it, along with the old email address and server she had used while out of office. She never had an @state.gov email address: