Blog Posts by Richard Evans

As I write this there are exactly four days three hours and 42 minutes until the Royal Wedding. To celebrate this fact, here is a picture of the happy couple depicted as toppings on a pizza - the way in which all such events should be commemorated apparently.

While my ability to countdown from seven might underwhelm you, I have been impatiently waiting for this week to climax for the past 120 days. Of course I am gleefully overjoyed at the love between Prince William and Kate Middleton - akin to a giddy schoolgirl — however for my own selfish reasons I cannot wait until it's all over. I'm probably more excited about the honeymoon than William. For you see, once the wedding is over so too is the circus that has engulfed the event for months.

Now, before I explain why I'm being such a stick-in-the-mud, I should try and pre-empt some of the angry folk out there who will misjudge me as a corgi-eating, flag-burning anti-royalist. Couldn't be further from the truth. In fact I actually quite

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For the past two months the 'most read' page on Yahoo! News has been heavily dominated by stories about weather. We've had snow in the UK, snowstorms in the United States, floods and cyclones in Australia and this week we've even seen lightning striking an erupting volcano in Japan. Wherever we look there's a weather oddity. They have become so frequent that the oddities are fast becoming the normality (cue the 'it's the end of the world' paranoia). Weather broadcasts have become the news, and the news has become an episode of 'The X Files'.

Throughout every week in December the most-read articles were all about our crises of the cold and this week has been no different - the only exception being that freakish weather is being endured by Australians and Americans this time round. It's clear that our fascination with the weather is wider than just when it affects our lives - it's a genuine interest held by us Brits to read and talk about the weather, no matter where it's occurring.

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"This isn't news". Those three words haunt me. I have seen them at least twenty times a day for the past three-and-a-half years. I've even started seeing them in my nightmares, splattered on my walls in Internet blood.

Tuesday was a typical example; we ran a story about David and Victoria Beckham's son, Romeo, being named as one of Britain's best dressed men by GQ magazine. We ran this in our 'Oddly Enough' section based on the fact it's strange for an eight-year-old boy to be considered a fashion icon, even stranger when you consider that he probably doesn't dress himself, and most obviously of all - he's not a man either.

On Twitter the words were there again. They had followed me from the comment section of articles onto social media. My tweet was commented on or re-tweeted ten times.  Of those ten, two commentators were unhappy at my decision to post the link. I can be callous like that sometimes if truth be told.

'WHO GIVES A FLYING F***????' and 'U SUCK' were the highlights of

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If you were going to choose a word to represent 2010 what would it be? Debt? Coalition? Wedding? Miners? Gamugate? Snow? There are lots to choose from. There are so many, in fact, that even the lexical behemoth that is the Oxford Dictionaries has struggled to narrow it down to just one word while it was selecting this year's 'Word of the Year'.

And so, without further ado, and not so much as a drum roll, I can reveal the 2010 Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year is... 'Big Society' or, yes, BS for short. Exciting, right? Call me a pessimist but it would appear that the Tory party's influence in the posher parts of the country is still rife.

Before you get carried away and make the same observation  I did when I heard the joyous news, pointing and laughing that 'Big Society' is actually two words, I have been assured that it still counts as one 'lexical item' and that if it were in the dictionary it would be a single headword, like 'food chain'. Perhaps they should rename the

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Well it's all over - the first papal visit to Britain since 1982 when John Paul II graced us with his presence has now come to an end. It didn't come cheap though; the four-day trip reportedly cost the taxpayer somewhere between £10 million and £12 million. So now come the usual questions; what did we learn? And, was it worth the cost?

I've spent the morning reading dozens of people's reactions to the Pope's visit, many of whom claim to have learnt something deep and profound as a result. Peter Stanford (a Catholic journalist, I should point out) for example writes in The Telegraph that the Pope's visit meant that 'politicians may listen more carefully to church leaders when tackling tricky questions of public morality.' It may do. Probably won't, though.

The media's fawning over the entire event reminds me of '90s TV programme 'Jerry Springer' where, if you can remember, 60 minutes of chair-throwing was always justified with a 15-second sound-bite at the end of the show called

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How old are you? What are your hobbies and interests? Are you single? Would you mind telling me your political views? These are all questions that the majority of Facebook's 26 million UK users freely offer the answers to. Last week saw the inception of a new question: Where are you? So should we be answering that question too? It's obviously a matter of preference. My preference is a wholehearted no. Here's why.

The rapid pace at which technology is evolving continues to raise sociological and ethical questions and no company is pushing the boundaries further than Facebook in that respect. With every modification, every enhancement, comes a new debate on privacy.

If you're a Facebook account holder then data about you is already being used so that companies can serve you with adverts that are relevant to you - it's called targeted advertising. Imagine how valuable it would be to advertisers if they could find out - in addition to what they already know - not only which type of places

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It's back, the debate that has been quietly raging on the backburner since the 1960s. And while the debate is back, perhaps the clocks might not be.

David Cameron last week signalled his willingness to look at a bill calling for a double summertime. Sounds great, doesn't it? I'm no mathematician but I estimate that to be roughly twice as good as normal summertime.

The bill, which was put forward by Rebecca Harris, the Tory MP for Castle Point in Essex, would mean that the clocks would be put forward one hour all year round, resulting in darker mornings but lighter evenings. The move would involve not turning the clocks back in October and then moving the time forward one hour next spring. The practice of putting the clocks back an hour in the autumn would then continue. Simple.

You might think that the change is aimed at us, the British public, to boost our morale and to put an end to the national saying: 'Hey! What happened to our summer?' It's not. What it boils down to, as always,

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Five years ago when I was a 'newbie' to the London 'scene', and when people used words like 'newbie' and 'scene', my flatmate and I decided it would be a good idea to enter into the world of online dating to meet new people. This was before it was cool. This was when, if someone asked what your plans were for the weekend, you would rather lie and say you were taking your Nan out for a night on the tiles than admit you were about to go on a date with a total stranger.

My online dating experience lasted around 15 minutes, during which I almost wished I was taking my Nan out. I'd been messaging a lady for around a week or so before we decided to meet up. She was on holiday in Kuala Lumpur at the time so she asked me to meet her on her return at Heathrow. Yes, I know I'm an old romantic.

In her emails she came across as smart, funny, and most importantly, sane. In person, however, she was not. I won't go into full details of her insanity but within the first 60 seconds she had admitted to

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