I was reading a thread about whether you should allow your your dog to get in bed with you. I had to laugh, because it reminded me of when me and The Wife had a poodle. She totally doted on that dog (and rightly so, it was very cute!) so when we went on holiday she was reluctant to put it in kennels.

Instead, we got my nephew and his girlfriend to house-sit and look after the dog. We issued strict instructions that the dog must sleep in the bed as she was used to doing with us.

All went well for the first couple of nights until my nephew woke up to hear a lapping kind of noise. He looked over to the other pillow where his girlfriend was also awake and clearly hearing the same thing. He threw back the covers and found the dog contentedly licking up a wet, soggy pile of sick on the undersheets!!

Bleuch!

Naturally, the dog didn’t sleep with them for the rest of the week  

As my long-suffering wife will attest after a lifetime of standing next to me at parties, I don’t dress that well. In fact I have attracted much comment down the years for my sartorial style which is – by general agreement – pretty ‘unique.’

Partly this is because when I was growing up, there was hardly any culture of fashion around me at all so it just never registered with me. Clothes were a purely functional item in our house -if you had trousers on you were good to go!

And then there was cost. I’m a frugal kind of guy so the prospect of forking out a load on fancy togs seemed abhorrent to my inner financial advisor. 

But things have changed dramatically over the last few years. The sweatshops of China and India have been fired up and allied to our fancy modern logistical enterprises (represented most commonly by the likes of Tesco and ASDA) and all of a sudden, nice clothes are within easy and tempting reach of even confirmed tightwads like me.

And now the internet is everywhere, even someone like me has found myself gravitating to designer menswear sites to peruse the latest trends and fashions. I feel a bit strange after so many years of taking no interest at all in this stuff, but like so many consumer activities it becomes strangely compelling after a while.

Worse – I’ve just realised I’m missing the snooker to muse on this point!! Check back next week when I reveal my love of researching cat breeds online

The election is already getting tedious to a lot of people – even though in many ways it is one of the most critical we’ve had in the last couple of decades. The economy might be showing signs of growth but the elephant in the room is still the huge deficit that the Government is running.

Labour are proudly pointing out that unemployment is nowhere near the levels it reached during the last couple of Tory recessions and using that as vindication of their policies. In fact, looking at the number of jobs being created over the last year, it is obvious that a big percentage are actually being created in the public sector.

That’s fine, but when the government’s debt is so huge there is no way that that can be sustained. And you have to remember that every public sector employee is paid from tax money so is actually adding to the debt in the first place.

It’s pretty obvious that there will have to be some major spending cuts across the board to rebalance the economy and that will mean jobs losses in the public sector. This isn’t a party political point, because regardless who wins the election they’ll face the same decisions.

I expect that floods of people will find the next year or two very hard as a result of either higher taxes or public sector job cuts. I know that my friend Mike – employed on the North Sea gas fields for nearly 25 years has taken one of the many jobs in Dubai that have been created during the same time as our own economy has been teetering.

As talent and skills flood to places like that, it’s hard to see how the economy will recover any time soon.

I think I’m going to go to the pub to try and forget about it!!

Sitting here in my hotel room in Davos has given me the chance to check out the launch of the long awaited Apple iPad and looking at it with my colleagues here they were definite mixed reviews. I’m not sure what we were all expecting because, in some people’s eyes, it is another Sony e reader, but it really is more than that.

The Apple iPad is not something you’re going to want to use to churn out loads of the written word like this one. If you work in publishing like I do, or your job entails writing reports, then the iPad probably isn’t for you. You’d be better off getting a netbook or ultra light notebook. I think it looks as though it might be great for visual applications such as reading e-mail, looking at photos, watching video, and reading e-books are all highly visual tasks. We all expected Apple to do something different than just making the iPad look like an oversized iPod Touch, even work similarly, but that could be an advantage who knows, millions of people are already familiar with the iPhone so that could be its big advantage.

It is not possible to make a judgment on the iPad without seeing it and trying out the features along with the apps that will come along, I’m sure that there are millions out there that will fall for the iPad straight away, I know one guy who was with me last night that can’t wait to get his hands on one, me I think I will stick to my netbook and computer, for the moment anyway, we shall see!

I’ve just had my central heating looked at and cleaned out, and I’ve been told I need a new bathroom radiator. Since I’m soon to get a wood burner to power the heating i guess i might as well have a larger bathroom radiator since it does seem to always be a little chilly in there.

The reason to get the log burner is that i live near a local wood and can get a lot of wood and i have access to plenty of logs so i might as well heat the house for free. Well it’s going to cost me to get a stove put in but i think the constant heat in winter will far outweigh the costing of using my central heating all the time.

The wood burner is going to be a hunter and it will probably cost me around £700. Plumbing it in and getting the chimney lined will probably cost quite a bit but I’m sure within a few years the wood burning stove will have paid for its self