Steve Litchfield

Not a click-bait title at all - I'm quite serious. And the point won't take long to make, I promise. Exactly as they sound, Bananabix are Weetabix cereal 'biscuits' infused with chunks of dried banana - and they're delicious. Add cold milk and enjoy any time of the day, etc. There's one problem, however. They're darned hard to get hold of. In Berkshire, in the UK, we have supermarkets everywhere. Large and small, almost a dozen chains of shops. Every single shop sells the 'plain' Weetabix, most sell the various chocolate-infused Weetabix (nice idea, but way too sickly IMHO), many sell the 'Protein' variety, and a few sell 'Oatibix', presumably made without wheat. There's also a fruit and nut version seen occasionally. And, just as occasionally, I see a shop selling my favourite. The legendary Banana Weetabix. And so I buy a clutch of packets - because I know darned well that it will be weeks before I find anywhere else that both s...

We've all been there. Listening to a well known podcast and the host says 'And now a word from our sponsor', followed by three minutes of waffle about mattresses or pelvic grooming tools or NordVPN or whatever. What do you and I do? Immediately hit the 'skip 30 seconds' button a few times in our podcatcher, until our ears detect that the advert slot is over. So we hear perhaps the first few seconds of the advert and maybe the last few, if we're unlucky. So what's the point? Annoying those listeners who don't have a hand free to reach out and hit the skip button? It beggars belief that there are still companies willing to pay significant money for multi-minute ad spots on podcasts. Isn't it just a big waste of their money? The same applies to video podcasts and embedded sponsor slots in videos too, since the timeline bar has a handle and it's trivial to slide this over a few minutes to miss out anything that's not core content. So what's t...