Yesterday I was in Nottingham with my friend Kwansuree to attend a public session of teachings from the Dalai Lama. The theme was ‘Bringing Meaning to Our Lives’. His Holiness is in the UK to hold a series of meetings with political and spiritual leaders, and to bring a simple message of hope and the achievement happiness through compassion and understanding for all human beings. For these public teachings he warned the audience that if our motivation to attend was because of wanting to witness the cult of the Dalai Lama, or to receive his wisdom and solutions to our problems, then we were certain to be disappointed, ‘I am just a simple monk’, he told us at the start. That said, there is no doubt that many of the 10,000 or so in the audience, myself included, came because of the tremendous warmth and charm of the 14th Dalai Lama that adds considerable substance to his simple message.

If your hot beverage of choice is tea rather than coffee then head on over to the Rare Tea Company. Henrietta Lovell, the proprietor sells the most amazing teas and she’s a jolly nice person to boot, happy to chat about her selection of teas to help you make a choice. I can recommend them all but particularly special are the Jasmine Silver Tip and Oolong tea. For the single tea drinker I can also recommend buying the White porcelain tea pot and tea cup.

While you’re at it head on over to the testimonials on the web site. Yours truly somehow managed to enthuse about Henrietta’s tea right next to Angelica Huston. So you’ll be in good company for your next cuppa!

For my birthday today (yeah, 43, who’da thunk it) my brother emailed me the CD cover meme. Being a bit of a music fan I like this meme very much. The idea is that by following 3 simple rules you generate your own CD album cover via the synchronicity of random selection, or something like that. The rules are:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Now combine these elements in your favourite image editing package and you have your CD cover. There’s even a Flickr group for other people’s CD covers. Some are very good indeed.

Mine had a kind of resonance on this my birthday.

A questions for compulsive twitterers, do you ever think anything you don’t twitter?

Yay, just when I needed a boost someone found a couple of my pictures and put them in a travel guide to Vancouver. I love this particular shot myself so it’s great that others do too. I loved Vancouver and hope to go back again one day.