NoFakie

Not big on UK cheese but they do big blocks of various standardish cheeses. Maybe a mature US cheddar among them. Some smaller, good European cheeses at "not take the piss" prices too. Have a gnaw on a bulgogi bake on the way out.

If there is no room in your fridge and you live in a house, maybe the crawl space/foundations under it, which should be noticably cooler than outside. There is something like a three-four month lag between ground temperature and air temperature, so the ground will be cooler in summer and warmer (than outside) in winter.

Pie and chips! It's been a long time.

糖粉. Not that difficult to find, but it might be slightly different. Japanese do gateaux very well, so many shops carry it. By comparison, the really dark brown wettish sugars can be very hard to locate. Golden syrup too. Basically the stuff you use in fruit cakes and steamed puds, all the heavy desserts. Sprinkles, hundreds and thousands, choc drops etc., to make kids cakes are also much cheaper overseas. Cup cakes are well trendy now, so I bet the selection overseas will be massive. Maybe I need to research Yorkshire puds more!

Some yummy stuff in there, plus deoderant, which must cost about five times as much per volume in Japan. It's the first time I've heard someone bring flour or icing sugar.

Out of the mentalist frying pan into the mentalist fire! Arguably the only suitable replacement! I hope he comes back though. I'll support Liverpool for the title if they get him. My second team is actually Citeh because I used to watch them when I lived in Manc. Two titles is probably enough for the time being though, to keep things interesting.

Scholes and the Nevilles may be pundits now but the one with the most influence is Giggs.

It looks very onsen-inspired to me. Shower outside a nice deep bath that gaijin sans may want to fill with bubbles, but Japanese people won't. Combinations of wood and black slate are pretty common at onsens and onsen-inspired home bathrooms. I only mentioned the windows steaming up, like they do at most onsens in winter, because someone questioned the practicality of it.

It looks like a big, if wide-angle lens exaggerated, slate-lined wet room with a bath in the middle. Lovely big window. If the shower is the thing on the wall with the dials by the bath, maybe they didn't use it for very long because the glass would have steamed up. Showers are like humidity machines. The bath on its own shouldn't steam up the windows. Looks a pain if you have to clean it, but its in a hotel so that doesn't matter. It'll take some heating too. If you've got a lot of space and a big budget, having the shower semi-partitioned off with ventilation would be a better desig

We went camping last week. We went a day late because of the typhoon, but still got hit by a downpour starting at 4am. It was still raining when we left at 10am. Our tent is about twenty years old and leaks like mad. It was like a pool inside. Its been raining here loads as well, so it was four days before I hang the thing up and dry it in the sun. Don't let your shichirin get wet! They go all crumbly.

We had one go at one and that was enough. Aldi and Lidl don't have them, so maybe the bean counters got this one wrong.

I bet there is still a bc scene around Hachimantai if you're heading from Niigata all that way north.

First game of the season for the Toon last night, so I had some brown ale. The "miracle" one made by Sapporo. They sell in only in convenis by the sounds. Full bodied, but nothing special. I won't buy it again.

I don't know the end cost but the headline cost of 1GB a month on Y! Mobile is 3000 yen. 3GB is 4000. That's for smartphone data and 300 calls, not just calls and e mail like Willcom. Their target is cheapskates like me who've not got a smartphone yet. If you're not on Softbank (part of Yahoo's group), you can switch to them and get a free phone by the sounds. They only use budget phones, so no Iphone or Galaxy, but the review sites say the Nexus 5 is pretty good.

Liverpool do just enough but a win's a win. All set up now for Citeh to win by more than one and go top and the Toon bottom.

Last chance for predictions, so here goes. If Aguero stays fit, Citeh will win the league with him top scorer. Chelsea and Arsenal look nailed on for Top 4 too. I guess Liverpool for the 4th spot. Man U have to go out and buy. I don't really understand the formation tbh. Rooney RVP plus width (di Maria! Januzaj!) makes more sense than shaking the whole team up to accommodate Mata. If Mata can change his game to a more standard center mid like Modric has at Madrid, maybe there is some hope. Two forwards and a pure central AM just looks congested. Newcastle 12th maybe. Our defence is

Not true....I have a BSc in Psychology and a fat lot of good its done me Can you give us an Ippy length critique of The Century Of Self? I've watched several times and its one of my favourite documentaries. I studied the "dismal science" myself, but came out with a BA.

Another great Ippy story! If Newcastle College is the old CAT, my brother went there when he was 19. He left school at 16 and started an apprenticeship at the same place as my old man, but liked it even less than school. I think he ended up doing wacky A levels like Sociology and Politics that most sixth forms won't touch. Whatever they were, they got him off to Glasgow, just in time for City of Culture year where all the bars and clubs had 4am licences. Newcastle was still 10.30 last orders in the pubs. When their time comes, I doubt my folks have enough for me to have to pay inherita

They're great. I love anything licorice.

Yeah, its been another summer of ManYoo being linked with big name players and them going elsewhere. Its been going on for years. You can't argue with any of the success they had under Fergie, but I don't think its as easy to get away with not buying players that they can clearly afford when the competition is a stable-looking Citeh and Chelsea. Arsenal seem to have got over the "selling club" phase they had after moving stadiums and are now buying Man U level players. Ramsey is also looking like the new Scholes or Lampard. Liverpool too are looking pretty good. The hype about van Gaal

Looking on Amazon, the ingredients for Thorntons Special Toffee include condensed milk before butter. It looks like they use condensed milk and veggie oil as a cheapo industrial substitute for cream. The "special chewy toffee" recipe on epicurious that folks claim to be very close to Thorntons has a lot of cream in it, along with golden syrup. The recipe I used was very similar but had the Japanese mitsu-ame clear syrup in place of the golden one, which is quite hard to find in inaka.　 Since mine came out as hit with a hammer toffee and not soft caramels, I got to eat it all by myself!

I tried making caramels once using the most popular recipe on cookpad (Japanese recipe site, I looked there because they usually list ingredients that you can easily get in Japan). Anyway, I overcooked the mix and ended up with something that was very close to Thorton's toffee. Very hard, but softens in the mouth, pull your fillings out sticky chewy and pretty creamy. From that conclusive evidence, I suspect toffee might just be caramel with more of the moisture (in the cream, syrup etc.) boiled off before the mixture is allowed to cool.

With arts degrees, it doesn't really matter what it says. I think it might be different for the sciences. Lots of kids stay at home now and go to the local university to cut costs, so the "experience" will be less but the piece of paper will cost much more. For actual studies, more and more people will end up doing online courses. They can be run for a fraction of the cost.

Does anyone know anyone on Y! Mobile? They sound a fair bit cheaper than smartphones on other carriers. You get 300 free calls a month as well. I don't know what the conditions are, but online you can get a Nexus 5 for free on the "switch carriers, keep you number" thing (MNP). If I can do it for 4-5000 a month, I might get one.

Everton could do really well again this time. I reckon Martinez is suspect defensively but Moyes left him such good players in that department that it doesn't matter.