One of the pleasures of a Sunday morning is reading the Observer in bed when it arrives… having changed from the Independent on Sunday as a result of its ridiculous obsession with celebrity, its sub-Dawkins aggressive, unthinking secularism and, well, Janet Street-Porter.

And counter-intuitively, the first section I turn to (as a bleeding-heart LibDem-voting arts graduate yadda yadda) is Business & Media – partly for the Media pages, which are generally excellent, but also, bizarrely, for the opinion and, in particular, Simon Caulkin, ‘Management Editor’.

Now, I would no sooner expect to enjoy a column by any Management Editor than I would the newsletter of the Celine Dion Fan Club. But, actually, Simon Caulkin is right on the money, every week. This week’s column is just one example, and this paragraph is air-punchingly, hallelujah-shoutingly glorious:

“Of course there’s no hiding that much public service is depressingly bad, but again this has nothing to do with public or private; customer service in the private sector is equally poor. This is not surprising because, ironically, the badness in both cases could be said to be another market externality – the purchase of identical IT-based mass-production service systems geared to meeting the internal incentives of the management consultancies that sell them rather than the needs of the end customer. Intrinsically, there is no reason why public-sector organisations cannot provide service at least as good as the best private sector outfits – and a growing number of them do.”

Please excuse me while I print this out in 72pt type and post it to A Certain Public Sector Agency which we all know and love.

Here’s a pleasant picture of Iago moored up for the night at Great Haywood, from the start of our holiday. Not because I particularly want to write about Great Haywood, more because I am relieved at finding out that I didn’t wipe all my pictures after all, and besides, I need to work out how this WordPress thing works.

Half an hour and much gnashing of teeth later: “how this WordPress thing works” should be “why this WordPress thing doesn’t work”.

I got fed up with my homemade blogging software, because it was quite appallingly primitive, and decided to move to WordPress like the rest of the world. So this blog is under reconstruction, a bit. Hopefully having a system that doesn’t rely on flat files and can handle RSS properly (*spit* bloody XML *spit*) will make it less excruciating for me to pen deathless prose about our canal trip, NCN escapades, hymnbooks, why Republic is the most under-rated New Order album, naive attempts at psychogeography, etc. etc.

I’ve set up redirects for all the old entries – after all, it would be such a shame if the top Google result for “Tridion review” suddenly disappeared – but comments won’t work on them any more (perhaps fortunately).