Looking back on some old posts I noticed that my blog is one year old today. I think I have done quite well in the past year as I have managed to write a post nearly every day. I wonder whether I will manage to post so frequently in the next year.

Monty is one lucky cat. After Monty fell asleep inside the rear bumper of a car, his owner drove off, not knowing Monty was there. The cat managed to cling on for 30 miles before eventually falling off when the car reached 60mph on the M60. Monty then ran across the lanes of traffic to the embankment where his owner later caught him. Despite his adventure Monty’s only injuries were a black eye, a few cuts and some missing teeth.

No unfortunately I am not a millionaire but I did manage to win £30 on the lottery this weekend. As someone who plays a line of numbers every week, I have so far had three wins, all of them rather small. The first was £10, then a rather more acceptable £80 and now £30. I think I am just saving up for a big win, it is sure to be the jackpot next time. At least my £30 will pay for my lottery ticket for the next few weeks.

A Malaysian burglar was caught after he took time out from robbing a house to help himself to some cookies. As we all know, after eating cookies you really need a good nap and that’s just what the burglar did next. Needless to say when the family who owned the house arrived home the burglar was quickly discovered and was arrested for trespassing.

I read this article that suggests British people are unable to distinguish between real historical figures and fictional characters. The article highlights a survey carried out by the British TV channel UKTV Gold. The results make interesting reading, people thought that Robin Hood, Biggles and Sherlock Holmes were real people but that Winston Churchill was a fictional character. Two thirds of people questioned thought that King Arthur was a real person with 58% saying that Sherlock Holmes was also real. 47% said that Richard the Lionheart was a myth and 23% thought Winston Churchill was not real. The TV channel said that the findings of the survey showed a fascinating insight into the role that fiction has had in this country over the last 50 years. Funny, I thought it was just a shocking example highlighting a lack of education.

Greg Mulholland, a Liberal Democrat MP has called for pubs to introduce smaller wine glasses. He says that many licensed premises have stopped selling wine in smaller 125ml glasses and now only serve it in 175ml and 250ml glasses. His view is that these larger glasses can lead to people drinking more than they want to and more than is safe if they are driving. He plans to introduce a sale of wine bill that will force all licensed premises to offer the standard 125ml measures alongside the bigger glasses. One of these large glasses contains twice as much wine as a small glass or around a third of a bottle.

Sometimes I come across something really strange and unexpected, like this surfing cat for example. Although the cat doesn’t look very happy it appears to be able to surf by grabbing onto the edge of the surfboard. I wonder whether any of my cats can surf.

I have noticed that eBay have been making a few changes recently. The first is that they will be introducing higher charges for selling items. Although the fee for listing an item will decrease from 15p to 10p, EBay’s cut of the final selling price will actually increase. This will mean that the fee charged will increase from 5.25% to 7.5% that’s roughly 68p extra per item sold. It doesn’t sound like a lot and perhaps it isn’t if you just list the odd item every now and again. For those people that make a living selling on eBay however, it is likely to mean they will have increase their prices in order to make it worthwhile. Personally I have stopped listing on eBay altogether recently because it is expensive to keep relisting products and I often find that I spend more on fees in a month that I actually make from the listings. Not only do you have to take into the listing fee, the final value fee but if your customers pay via Paypal (owned by eBay) then they take a another cut for the transaction. There is good news, however for power sellers who will get discounts of up to 40% on the final value fees, but it does make me wonder if eBay is pushing out the small sellers.

The second change is that eBay are making changes to the way their feedback system works. The change means that eBay sellers will no longer be able to leave neutral or negative feedback for buyers although buyers will still be able to leave negative feedback for sellers. eBay are introducing the changes because they believe that it will encourage buyers to be more honest when leaving feedback as they will not fear receiving negative feedback in return. On a quick visit to the eBay forums I noticed that this change has left many sellers wondering what they should do if a buyer proves to be untrustworthy. The majority of comments are from people who have experienced fraudulent transactions from buyers in the past and feel that the new feedback changes will leave them unable to highlight these fraudulent buyers so that other users know to avoid them. It will be interesting to see how these new changes affect eBay but one thing is for sure there are certainly a lot of very unhappy people out there at the moment.