I’m sitting at the airport, having finally managed to find a plug for my laptop. Our flight time was meant to be around 1pm; but like many it was delayed. Now I’m relatively sanguine about this, after all there is fog and it’s being done for our safety. Yet what I find truly annoying is we knew...

UPDATE: In March 2012 Martin ran a competition to redesign Stamp Duty. A journalist recently asked me what I thought the UK’s most bizarre tax was. My answer, without any hesitation was stamp duty. Now I know inheritance tax haters may disagree, but for me, it’s not so much ‘what’s being taxed’, but ‘how we’re taxed’ that’s...

The wonderful MSE Andrea is pregnant and soon to go off on maternity leave. Yet she’s become a trouble maker. You see, sadly our Andrea loves her job a wee bit too much (not surprising really, she was a regular site user before becoming the first non-techie to come and help me with the site). Amongst many...

Thrifty Ways for Modern Days has joined the Money Diet as a bestseller debuting at number 11 in the Bookseller non-fiction paperback charts. Sadly it could’ve gone in at number 4, but for technical reasons it didn’t. The only sales that were in the chart were the pre-order sales from Play, but as Amazon was selling the...

On Sat night, I was lucky enough to be invited to ITV1’s an ‘Audience with Lionel Richie”. More about that in a moment; the serious stuff first. While I was there, a well known TV face came up to me and said, “I want to shake you by the hand, your site is brilliant and thanks to...

I’ve been a huge supporter of the crackdown on 0870 numbers for a long time. I wrote one of the first main newspaper articles about it (in the Sunday Express) a number of years ago and my current article (Say No To 0870 ) is a stalwart of the site. So as I’ve been appearing on the...

As regular MoneySavers will know, my spelling and grammar is sadly appalling. So I was rather pleased today that I knew that it should be “an LA Fitness loophole” rather than “a LA Fitness loophole” (article coming very soon). This started debate here in MSE Towers as to why, after all LA starts with a consonant not...

The MSG and I have just booked a holiday over the Christmas break. I’ve flown less this year than any recent year, as I took a decision that when travelling for work I now request that they get me a train ticket rather than a plane (e.g. if I’m going to Manchester or Edinburgh). Yet don’t think...

One of my best friends, Barbara, is currently covering the Pope’s trip to Istanbul for Al Jazeera International (she used to be the news reader at Five news, now she’s European correspondent and weekend anchor for AJ… but anyway I digress). She tells me she was in the specially set up Vatican newsroom, which is jammed with...

I’ve just (stupidly) returned to the office after doing the Wright Stuff (on Five TV). Last night at about 11 I started to feel a little queasy, by 1am I was in bed shivering with cold, even though the house was warm; by 3am I was having to camp out with my duvet on the floor of...