I was referred to as an ‘Englishman’ yesterday on a newsgroup. That startled me. Initially I wasn't sure why it startled me, since it wouldn't particularly surprise me to be referred to as English, and it's been some years since I had that reflexive am-I-sure-I'm-grown-up-yet hesitance to think of myself as ‘man’ rather than ‘boy’; after a bit of thought I decided that the reason is analogous to the way ‘girlfriend’ has a specific meaning distinct from ‘girl’ + ‘friend’. It wouldn't cause me cognitive dissonance to think of myself as an ‘English man’, but an Englishman is a stock character in Englishman-Irishman-Scotsman jokes!

I was listening to some Mesh the other day. A thing I keep meaning to mention in here is that for some years I've been unable to hear their song ‘Safe With Me’ without giggling, because the very first line, sung with almost no instrumental backing, is ‘This is my space, no-one can ever get in here’. I think I managed to take that vaguely seriously the first couple of times I heard it, but now I'm unable to parse it as anything other than ‘This is MySpace’.

Like last year, Sainsburys stopped stocking grape juice over the Christmas period, so I had to resort to temporarily buying it from Asda. To my increased annoyance, Sainsburys have now come back out of Christmas mode, and still aren't stocking white grape juice; it isn't in the online catalogue any more either, so as far as I can tell it's been permanently discontinued. (They still do red grape juice, but it's not the same.) So now I'm probably going to be making a special trip to Asda every month or two just for that. Gah.