This is drifty

A child hit by a car travelling at 30mph stands an 80% chance of living. A child hit by a car travelling at 40mph stands an 80% chance of dying.

I sometimes think the world is passing me by. Just lately there have been references to the Russell Group of universities. Now, I have - until these recent references - never heard of such a group. Who? What? When? Having resorted to Mr W Ikipedia I find that this group comprises 20 of the UK's leading universities, but when and why it was established is still a mystery to me.

I'm probably tempting providence by mentioning the improvement I have noticed in my Internet access over the last few days. It was back in July that my ISP undertook "improvements" to its service and since then I have experienced intermittent loss of access, sometimes for just a minute or so, sometimes for several minutes. For a few days now there has been no interruption. I'm not holding my breath.

I said yesterday that I was supposed to have been on bingo duty for the Lions during the week. This is a service activity for Brighton Lions. Four times a month we send Lions into local retirement complexes to run an evening's bingo session. I say an evening but the bingo generally lasts only a little over an hour. We charge the participants 50p for a book of five tickets. For those five games we pay the magnificent sum of £3 for a line and £6 for a full house. Then we give another ticket to each player and for this game we use all the money the players have paid, one third for the line and two thirds for the house. We get up to about 20 players each evening and they very often stay behind for a chat - and maybe a glass of wine - afterwards to make a social evening of it.

As well as eating foods such as stews, casseroles and puddings, now it's getting colder we have switched to more solid, chewy wines. No longer the lighter reds such as Saumur Champigny or Cotes du Ventoux, now it's Fitou, Cahors, Cotes du Rhone.