1. Gadgets.co.uk

Gadgets.co.uk stocks the latest gadgets that make great gifts or presents. They have a range of over one hundred unique gadgets with prices ranging from £9.99 to £400, with such a wise range to choose from there is usually something for everyone.
http://www.gadgets.co.uk

2. Dr Gadget

Dr Gadget stock a wide range of gadgets, gifts, gizmo’s and boys toys. They stock gifts for all occasions and are normally cheaper that all the usual high street brands. Also, they have been in business since 1999, so you know that they’re not going anywhere.
http://www.drgadget.co.uk

3. Firebox

An oldy but a goody, Firebox stock every gadget under the sun, from small gadgets through to big outdoor ones Firebox has it all. They tend to be one of the more competitive sites out there as well, plus there customer service is great.
http://www.firebox.com

4. Red 5

Red 5 is one of the most well rounded gadget stores online. It has something for everyone at superb prices and has 20+ stores throughout the UK giving you that extra piece of mind.
http://www.red5.co.uk/

5. JPK Online Retail

JPK Online Retail are my wildcard. They aren’t a specialist supplier of gadgets so there product range isn’t as varied as some of the others. However, they do have one of the best ranges of geeky gadgets I’ve managed to find online.
http://www.jpkonlineretail.co.uk/

Highlight is an app that sits on your phone and lets you know if anyone geographically proximate to you has anything in common with you and then tells you their name, shows you their photo and informs you of mutual friends and anything else that they’ve chosen to share. Advantages; it can connect you with like-minded people in the real, rather than the virtual, world. Disadvantages; are you just going to end up being continually bothered by random strangers walking up to you and knowing your synopsis, whilst you’re having a Valentine’s meal with your wife?

This debate has now been rattling on for  a while, but to be honest I can’t really see what all the fuss is about. If you don’t like the idea of Highlight, then don’t download the app. If you do like the idea of Highlight, then do download the app, but just use it in a business setting. So you’re at a conference in one of those interminable ‘networking’ events (even the thought brings me out in hives), simply make sure that your Highlight profile succinctly and imaginatively summarises you and your agenda (maybe you need an excellent copywriter for this, does anyone know one?) and then let the contacts come to you. And also let’s not forget that just because someone’s profile pops up on your phone, it doesn’t actually mean that you’ve got to go and find them, you could just carry on with what you were doing. Revolutionary eh?

The Ingleton Waterfalls trail has been attracting visitors since 1855 (so the sign at the gate told me) and even in sideways rain with occasional hail, it’s a thoroughly exquisite, lung expanding and mind clearing walk. For 2.5 hours I simply roamed along the trail stopping to look at some amazing waterfalls (made even more ferocious by the added amount of extra rainwater!) and generally ended up simply feeling better than I had before. The two highlights of the walk were definitely clambering along the rocks to actually stand behind the Thornton Force Waterfall (so loud that even stood next to each other we had to shout to be heard) and getting up to the top of the trail to find nothing more than an amazing view, a beautifully utilitarian farm track, more hail and an ice cream van. Two 99′s later, we set off back down the other side of the trail.

So, ramble done, head happy, legs cold and wet, feet deliciously warm in new thermal socks, we made the thoroughly un-arduous quarter mile journey to the Marton Arms Pub/Hotel. ”Ahhhh went my legs as we shambled into the lovely old, and splendidly warm, pub. ‘Hooray’ went my belly as my eyes transferred the view of a line of real ale pumps and a fantastic menu. And ‘Smile’ went my mouth as the genuinely friendly owner showed us to our sweet little room with  view of spring lambs actually springing! And here we hit the main point of today’s blog, go to the Marton Arms. The beer’s great, the food’s fantastic, the rooms are lovely and the staff are wonderful - excellent service, friendly, welcoming and just generally nice people.

So nothing about freelance copywriting, but I did have lovely time

Of the 6 shortlisted books, 2 really stood out for me as books that engaged and made me want to turn the pages and have been filed away on my somewhat overcrowded bookshelves to be read again one day. Barnes’ The Sense of and Ending was one of these. It is the story of a man who looks back on his life and discovers that his memories are less than perfect. On the surface it is a book about the mundanity of life but Barnes’ insightful focus on the minutiae of everyday existence and how our visions of ourselves, and more importantly how we want to see ourselves, shows the tragedy of our own skewed perception of our own existence.

My personal favourite from the shortlist was Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie. It is a proper old-fashioned story (like the ones we read as children) about the life and fates of Jaffy Brown, a boy growing up in the East End of London in the 1860′s. Jaffy’s life (although the name Jaffy was always too close to the Mr Jamrach of the title for my liking) finds him going from being in the jaws of a Bengal tiger, to working in the menagerie from which the tiger had escaped, to heading off to sea on the hunt for a Komodo Dragon. I loved following Jaffy as he worked his way through these roles, but it was the episode after the shipwreck that actually made me catch my breath and re-read the page to see if I’d truely read what had been written. Birch’s juxtaposition between the wonderful ‘proper’ story and the devastating ‘event’ that shocked and upset me, was an honestly great piece of storytelling that really made me want to start work on my own novel!

Amongst the rest of the shortlist A.D. Miller’s Snowdrops was a great insight into life in Russia and the crash between the old communist and the new capitalist cultures. Miller built up a great expectation of what was going to happen, but in the end I found it slightly disappointing, that the climax was not as shocking as I was expecting, but then maybe that says more about me (eek!). Also enjoyable was Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, a really fast read that drew me happily into the darkly funny world of Eli and Charlie Sisters, a pair of half reluctant and half splendidly murderous assassins in 1850′s America.

Less favourite were Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues, the first book that I selected to read from my shortlist after reading the blurb and discovering that it contained a character called Heironymous Falk (no  bad can come from a book with a character name like that, I thought), unfortunately I found the narrative surprisingly dull and nearly gave up half way through. My other disappointment came from Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English, after about  10 pages it was blatantly obvious what was going to happen but I ploughed on regardless, and rather wish I hadn’t. The issues Kelman raises are worthy, but his novel just wasn’t for me.

Let’s see what this year’s shortlist brings…

Simon Dalley, Director of Grow Traffic (one of my clients) said:

“I’ve been writing copy for years and I know the limitations of my creativity. I mean let’s face it, if cheese sells, I’m mass produced cheddar. My copy will fill a hole, convert it’s readership and generally do the business, however if you’re after something that’s a bit more Roquefort or Gruyere I’d pass you over Jenny Bennion every time. Jenny’s copy takes you on a journey, tantalizing the reader with every word, culminating in creative yet sophisticated call to actions that deliver enquiries and sales.”

Toot toot!

http://www.skiddle.com/news/all/Top-10-Blackpool-Hotels-/12080/

I know it’s horrendously uncool to like Blackpool, but I actually do rather. So writing a review of the Top 10 hotels was really quite nice, and seeing your name in print never hurts either

And here’s a few other fun things that I found out whilst researching the article. Blackpool has just refurbished the Tower Headland which is an out door arena with a capacity of up to 20,000 – even Elton John’s playing there in June 2012 (my mum is very excited and managed to get early tickets by giving her personal details and credit card number to one of the kids she teaches and tasking him with sitting trying to buy her tickets rather than doing Maths!), but it might lead to some other quite interesting outdoor gigs and festivals – keep an eye on Skiddle.com (and no, they didn’t even pay me to say that!). Also it’s not really news, but I’d forgotten quite how lovely the Tower and Empress Ballroom’s are, whether you pop in for a bit of a foxtrot, or I saw Elbow there the other year, they are seriously beautiful spaces just to be in.

This handy little site will save you hours of mind-boggling boredom by allowing you to import playlists from iTunes, LastFM, YouTube or even just a plain old csv file straight into Spotify. “Ou” you say (in a mildly interested manner), “well, read on” I say.

I recently spent many months thinking up a spectactulaly random assortment of song for my birthday party and just had them all in a notes app on my phone, this then got a transferred into Excel and added to and generally fiddled about with, until I thought that I had 6 hours of non-stop musical joy in list form, but in list form only. “Humpf” I thought.

Until I discovered Playlistify that is, it took my list of song titles and ‘baked’ them until they appeared as a playlist in my Spotify account, the whole process taking only a couple of minutes and requiring no real effort and costing exactly zero pence. “Huzzah” I thought (I may have gone a bit Enid Blighton there, but really what’s wrong with lashings of ginger beer? I quite like ginger beer.)

Now, as the programme only takes the song titles from your list it’s worth going through and checking that there’s not been the odd bit of confusion (for example it did decided to swap The Vapours for One Direction at one point!) but that just gave me the opportunity to further refine some of my choices i.e. did I really need both the theme tunes to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Saved By The Bell? Well yes, of course I did.

Playlistify also makes you publish your playlist in it’s directory (and asks you some slightly odd questions to do this), where you could go to find playlists published by other as well – I don’t know if I’d ever use this but there’s bound to be some stonkers in there so maybe it’d be worth a poke about.

But anyway, thank you Playlistify for making my birthday both a musical success story and not taking me via insanity to get there!

I know that Twitter is a big part of getting rank for your website these days, and so I tweet (therefore I am? No.) but no matter how much I do it, and how many times Gregg Wallace from Masterchef tweets about the minutiae of his life, I struggle to see the point, or to be frank find much interest in it.

If I want to send a message to one of my friends (because let’s face it, who else really follows you on Twitter?) then there are numerous other methods for doing this that are decidedly faster, simpler and more effective.

Ok, so if I want to tell the world (or my 3 followers) what I’m doing, then Twitter can achieve this. But do my 3 followers really care that I still haven’t mown the lawn?

I know that I’m in the minority here and probably deserve to be thrown off the internet, but I just can’t seem to summon the will power to find Twitter anything other than incredibly boring. And yes, I do now know that Stephen Fry will never come to my dinner party.

It’s all about #tweetingforeating.

I’ve just been writing an SEO article for lowcostgolfballs.co.uk, and through this have discovered that there is an actual industry, well sector, well who knows what, in which people dive into lakes and ponds on golf courses to retrieve lost golf balls that are then sold back to golfers. Is it me?

Now I know that for some reason many people love golf (my husband being one of them – until I hid his golf clubs in the attic that is) and I have to admit that I can see the appeal of going for a nice gentle wander around what are often quite pretty courses. But there the appeal ends, as Mark Twain said: ‘golf is a good walk spoiled’.

But it’s not only the spoiling of a good walk that confounds me, it’s the archaic, bizarreness and attachment of over-importance that golfers seem to fall prey to. In my younger years I worked behind the bar in a golf club and saw things such as: the club President and Lady President only ever being referred to as such, there being a code word for the special ‘milky coffee’ that was only ever to be served to club members (I can only presume that if a non-member were to crack the code and manage to consume this coffee, civilisation as we know it would crumble).

And now I discover that golf balls are so precious and special, that people purposefully dive into lakes and ponds – water traps, I believe is the word? – specifically so that people can hit them back into the water again. Diving for pearl stuffed oysters, yes. Golf balls, no.

However, I do like the natty Pringle tank tops that are so favoured by members of the golfing classes. Maybe I should sell one of the children and buy one?

1. Figure out what we’ll be doing in 6 months time. Will I still be living in mummy-land or will I be in working-mummy-land?
2. Stop writing pointless blog posts, and start blogging with a slightly more commercial outlook i.e. blog about being a freelance copywriter!
3. Get Snapdragon Fancy off the ground. After a very informative visit to the Spring Fair in February, la hubby and I found some fantastic suppliers of wonderful Children’s Nursery and Lifestyle products. Now I just need to build a brand, website, customer base and start selling!
4. Move to the countryside and make jam all day.