Walk into a Post Office these days and you may find yourself walking out having not only posted a parcel, but also signed up to a credit card, switched to a new telephone provider or insured your home.

As I was queueing in the Post Office last week, I overheard a conversation between a Post Office employee and an elderly customer:

“You’ve been a Post Office user all your life, so you can trust if us you switch your home insurance to us.”

So the Post Office are on the hard sell, the reason being the Department for Work and Pension’s decision to pay state benefits directly in people’s bank accounts instead of using the Post Office’s services, thus denting their yearly revenue significantly.

Their Chief Executive put a positive spin on the move towards providing financial services like this:

“Extensive research carried out among 20,000 customers clearly indicated a huge demand for financial services from a brand like the Post Office.”

If there’s such a demand, why do I always get told about the competitive interest rate on their Credit Card just as I’ve paid for a parcel to be delivered? One could argue it’s either that or a significant rise in the cost of posting items; I think I’d rather pay a bit more than be hassled by their insistent sales patter.

In 1990, New Order made a record with the England football team to raise morale and generally support the team in their bid to win the World Cup tournament of that year. It was a pretty good record, and made memorable by John Barnes attempt at rapping halfway through.

This song, however, pales into insignificance compared to the video you’re about to see, in which Swedish metal band ‘Hammerfall’ got together with the national women’s Curling team to make a record ahead of the Winter Olympics: Hammerfall – Hearts On Fire

Well it worked, they won Gold.

I’ve completed what I’ve been meaning to do for a few months, which is move this site over to Textpattern.

The old system was a home-made solution using PHP and Smarty, but while I got the front-end half way towards what I wanted it to be, the administration side was, admittedly, a mess; it just about did the job of maintaining the site, but not very well.

In the near future, I’ll probably write up the process I went through to get everything moved over from a home-brew system, and I’ll also share some thoughts on Textpattern itself.

In the meantime, it will be nice to write content using a feature rich and useable weblogging tool for a change!

Jeremy Hardy pays tribute to Linda Smith, who died today (Realplayer Audio). For those who, like me, enjoy listening to comedy on Radio 4, she’ll be missed.