Smylers

A train plan with most seats in green, including all 4 round 1 table and plenty of pairs of adjacent 2s; highlighted in blue are a pair of seats facing one way, one aisle seat in the row behind (with the window seat already taken) — and an aisle seat at the other end of the carriage, facing the other way

Booking 4 train tickets on a @trainsplit.com-powered site. Of all the available seats (in green), it's chosen these 4 for us (blue) — which one of us does it think should sit by themselves?

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I remember paying £2·99 with those envelopes which dropped out of weekend newspapers and junk mail.

Here's one which was £3·49 including being sent a new roll of film with your prints: www.ebay.co.uk/itm/25646502... (second-bottom pic for prices)

Oh, no! Ours did lots of other stuff, including a fantastic leavers' musical, but the Sats did seem to get in the way of things which were actually useful/fun/life-affirming.

At least you get to avoid being sad at it ending. I blubbed even on getting the email about the last-day arrangements!

Same — also 27, and also happy with it! #PopMaster

I hope the teachers appreciate that, and he manages to keep his spark despite the rigidity of the school system.

That's almost certainly a better answer than whatever the examiner was expecting. It's unarguable: there's no point in doing emergency drills other than people not wanting to die.

Best wishes for the Sats. So glad that is behind us. It felt such a distraction!

Brilliant! I love the pasta answer, too.

A piece of key stage 2 work on relative clauses where a 9 year old has pencilled in some answers.

Some of 9yo's home school work today is working on relative clauses. He had to finish the sentence 'JK Rowling is a famous author who...' and he finished it with 'is very transphobic'.

Puzzled Pint March 2026 — Escape Room When Tuesday March 10, 2026 Check your preferred location for times Where Solve the puzzle to display locations!

Have fun! I'm presuming that's the Horseferry Road in London (with Channel 4 on it), but that address could possibly do with something bigger than a road yet smaller than a country!

I'm also about to meet nerds in a pub — in my case, Puzzles nerds: puzzledpint.com

It was the group Alan Price formed after leaving The Animals. They had 4 top-10 hits. I saw them live in 2012.

The band featured Zoot Money on keyboards; when he crops up in questions, Ken always pronounces his name like “money” but Alan Price consistently said it as “M'nay”. #PopMaster

True, but it still might be expedient of a politician to claim to be listening to those views and that better leadership will help, cos that might be less hassle than saying the opposite!

Cheap oil allows us to grow huge crops and transport them around the world, trading (inedible) oil calories for delicious edible calories.

When the price of oil goes up, the price of food goes up way higher. Crops become more expensive to grow, fertilize, spray, harvest, transport, refrigerate.

5/

An *Aston* Fox should only appear in the lower-third of photos...

Screenshot of the sentence "I shall look into what that didn't happen this time," with purple dots under "look into" and the words highlighted in lilac; a pop-up menu has "Conciseness" as its first item, with a sub-menu saying "More concise language would be clearer for your reader" followed by the suggestion "investigate"

Outlook objecting to my using the phrase “look into”, telling me to be more concise ... and then suggesting instead to use “investigate”, which is longer!

artwork of a frog on a unicycle, made out of metal parts, and mounted on a wall with a colourful background

A bright yellow lemon on a pale blue background, with newspaper-style cut-out letters stuck on it spelling out ‘Feeling Sorry for Celia’, a book my Jaclyn Moriarty

Hints and explanations for today's Telegraph #CrypticCrossword are here: bigdave44.com/2026/03/09/d... — along with this frog, my favourite New Order Song, the Roger Stevens Building, a snake hiding in a log, and a completely unrelated book review.

DM if you want a gift link to the puzzle.

Ah, thanks. John replied between my leaving a tab open with your message to investigate, and my actually replying several hours later!

Oh, I thought I'd read The Telegraph say somewhere (centenary celebrations? puzzles newsletter?) they've been doing quickie puns since the 1960s, but I now can't find it, so maybe I misremembered.

This is the warning on the blood pressure monitor my dad just got.

Exceptional work. Anybody know what the fuck it’s supposed to mean?

Last line is especially ominous

My all-time favourite is Amy Housewine.

Arctic Numpties Debut Album 20th Anniversary Show Friday 27 November 2026 at 7:30pm Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

I do like it when a covers-band name requires no further explanation:

Absolutely. And Stannage did it really well — far better than most could impersonate Paterson's distinctive style.

… look like James's eyes are actually intrinsically different to other characters'.

In Nick Brennan's style, James now has black-dot eyes. James has appeared in an All-Stars story since then with blue eyes, which now looks even more out of place, but is presumably just a timing thing.

One of the things I found odd about Calamity James is that because Stannage/Paterson has a style of characters having coloured eyes, when James appeared in other strips, he still had blue eyes there, even when that didn't match the style of black-circle eyes of the other characters, making it …

This may be because I struggled with Leslie Stannage's art, which often came across as “very like Tom Paterson but not-quite Tom Paterson”, and that not-quite made it feel weird. Whereas Nick Brennan is doing a good Nick Brennan, rather than slightly-off Tom Paterson, if that makes sense?

I actually like new Nick Brennan style. There's now been a full-page one with him redoing the title, so it seems he's permanent.

My child thought I wouldn't like it, but I actually think it looks good and fits the character.

Also, it was one of the few Beano strips we could work out the artist of in the 80s: while DC Thompson drawings were unsigned, Tom Paterson signed Watford Gapp in Wizzer & Chips, and his style was so distinctive it was clearly him.

I remember Calamity James's arrival, too: very different to Biffo the Bear and Little Plum. I didn't get it at first, finding the pages too busy, until my dad enthused about it, and it quickly became one of my favourites. Glad it's still going.

"Nothing seems quite right for dinner," he said choosily

Smylers, for breakfast, had muesli,
And later, for dinner, ate fusili.
Then at tea time,
No food would rhyme,
So he had to invent something new-sli.

Today I've eaten:
breakfast — muesli
dinner — fusili

Not decided on tea yet, but I can't immediately think of another word that rhymes …