The Day I Built a Bomb

When I was about seven or eight years old, back in the mid-70s, kids had a lot more freedom than they do now. Most weekends involved disappearing for hours with your mates, getting filthy, climbing things you shouldn’t climb, and generally causing low-level chaos without adults knowing where you were.

I did once set light to somebody’s garden! But they had cut down their long grass and left it to dry out in Summer. What were they thinking! Looking back, it’s amazing any of us survived childhood intact. BTW, if you lived at 17 Crewe Avenue (Ferrybridge), in the 1970's, I apologise for my behaviour!

At the bottom of our road there was a row of old wooden garages, tucked between our school and the cemetery, with a field for horses on one side. One day we discovered that if you shifted some loose boarding around the back of one of them, you could squeeze inside. 

The garage looked abandoned to us ... honestly. There were car parts everywhere, old paint tins, bits of copper pipe, electrical cable, tools, and a couple of empty gas canisters. To a group of young lads, it looked like buried treasure.

So naturally, we decided to build a “bomb”.

Not a real one obviously. More the sort of ridiculous Heath Robinson contraption only children could invent. We threaded cables through car radiators, stuck pipes into paint tins, connected random bits of metal together, and made the whole thing look as dramatic as possible. 

We thought it was hilarious. None of us had the slightest idea how serious it might appear to somebody else, especially during a time when news about bombs and the troubles in Northern Ireland filled the television almost daily.

The next day, bomb disposal turned up.

I still remember the sinking feeling in my stomach when I saw them there. Even as a kid, I suddenly realised this wasn’t funny any more. We’d actually convinced grown adults that something dangerous had been hidden in that garage. 

Thankfully, after a few tense hours, they packed up and left without blowing anything sky high. Our masterpiece of wires, pipes, and scrap metal had been exactly what it really was ... a pile of junk arranged by bored children with too much imagination.

It still makes me laugh now, but there’s also a strange little lesson buried in it somewhere. Kids often don’t understand the world they’re growing up inside. We were pretending to build something from an adventure film, while the adults around us were seeing something entirely different.

The Building Blocks of Better SEO

A short, practical guide to the layers that help product pages rank better in Google.

I was recently asked to look at SEO for a couple of product ranges for our New Zealand business. Nothing unusual there. Product SEO is one of those jobs that sounds simple at first, then quickly turns into a pile of small, connected jobs.

You can’t just add a keyword to a title, write a quick paragraph, and expect Google to suddenly fall in love with the page. Sometimes that helps, but proper SEO is built in layers. Some layers have a bigger ranking impact than others, but they all support each other.

The image below is a simple way of thinking about it.

1. Helpful, high-quality content

This is usually the biggest piece. A product page needs to be useful to the person landing on it. That means clear product details, practical descriptions, specifications, FAQs, and anything that helps the buyer make a decision.

For construction and trade products, this might include sizes, materials, use cases, compatibility, pack quantities, safety information, installation notes, and the type of customer or job the product is best suited for.

Google’s own guidance talks about creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, rather than content written mainly to manipulate rankings. That’s a useful test for product pages. Would this page genuinely help a buyer, or is it just a thin page with a few search terms sprinkled in?

2. Authority and trust signals

Good content works better when the wider web gives Google reasons to trust the site. Relevant links, trade mentions, customer references, reviews, supplier relationships, and brand mentions can all help build confidence around a business.

For a B2B construction product range, this doesn’t have to mean chasing hundreds of random backlinks. A link or mention from a relevant merchant, trade customer, industry partner, buying group, case study, supplier page, or local business profile may be far more useful than a pile of weak directory links.

Google also says links help it discover pages and understand relevance, so internal and external linking still matter when they’re natural, crawlable, and useful. 

3. Site architecture and internal linking

Even strong product pages can struggle if they’re buried too deep or disconnected from the rest of the site.

A sensible structure helps both users and search engines understand what the business sells. Categories, subcategories, product ranges, and supporting guides should link together in a way that feels obvious.

For example, a temporary fencing page might naturally link to construction barriers, pedestrian barriers, road cones, safety signage, and relevant support articles. This isn’t just an SEO trick. It helps customers move around the site and find related products.

4. Keyword research and search intent

Keyword research isn’t about stuffing pages with phrases. It’s about understanding how customers search.

In the New Zealand market, people may use different language from UK customers. They may search by product name, use case, category, regulation, or problem. That matters. A page targeting “temporary fencing” may need different wording from one targeting “site fencing”, “construction fencing”, or “crowd control barriers”.

The aim is to map each page to the right search intent. Product pages should target buying or specification searches. Guides and FAQs can target research searches. Category pages can sit between the two.

5. Technical foundations

The technical side doesn’t always feel glamorous, but it can quietly hold everything else back.

Pages need to be crawlable, indexable, fast enough, mobile-friendly, secure, and easy for Google to understand. Titles, headings, meta descriptions, image alt text, clean URLs, canonical tags, redirects, and structured data all play their part.

Google’s Search Essentials highlight the need for crawlable links, indexable content, and words that people would use when searching for your content. In plain English: Google needs to access the page, understand the page, and see that it matches what people are looking for.

Supporting signals

There are also smaller supporting signals that can help strengthen the overall picture.

Social mentions probably won’t transform rankings on their own, but they can increase visibility and lead to trade mentions, customer links, and brand searches. Schema markup can help search engines understand page content. Image optimisation can bring traffic through image search and improve page performance. Analytics helps show what is working. Regular updates keep pages accurate and useful.

None of these should replace the bigger layers, but they’re worth doing properly.

A simple SEO process for product ranges

For a product range, I’d keep the process fairly straightforward:

1. Check whether the page can be crawled and indexed.
2. Review the current title, H1, headings, meta description, and URL.
3. Research how customers in that market actually search for the product.
4. Map one main keyword theme to each page.
5. Improve the product content so it answers real buyer questions.
6. Add useful internal links from related categories, products, and guides.
7. Look for genuine trade, supplier, customer, or partner mentions.
8. Add or improve images, alt text, FAQs, and schema where useful.
9. Track rankings, impressions, clicks, and enquiries over time.
10. Review and update the page when the product, market, or Google guidance changes.

The main point

SEO works best when all the layers are in place. A technically sound page with thin content won’t do much. A brilliant guide that nobody links to or can easily find may also struggle. A page packed with keywords but written for nobody in particular is unlikely to build trust.

For product SEO, the best starting point is still simple: make the page genuinely useful, make sure Google can understand it, and connect it properly to the rest of the site.

That won’t guarantee rankings overnight, but it gives the page a much better chance.

Healthy Dog Treats

We got fed up with only really having unhealthy treats in supermarkets to give Hela, our German Shepherd, so I went hunting for a healthy dog treat recipe that she’d actually enjoy.

And I think I found it.

These are really simple sweet potato dog biscuit recipe. They’re basically just two ingredients, with one optional extra if your pampered pooch fancies a bit more flavour (Hela did).

You’ll need:

• 240g wholemeal flour
• 225g sweet potato, cooked and pureed
• Optional extra: crispy bacon, blended into a powder

I cook the bacon until it’s nice and crispy, then blend it down into a powder before adding it to the mix. You don’t need loads, just enough to give the biscuits that little bacon smell dogs seem to detect from three rooms away. I suppose you could substitute for chicken, or perhaps even cheese or a little peanut butter (although you might have to add a little more flour).

Mix everything together. It’s easier while the sweet potato is still warm, as it helps bring the dough together, don't be afraid to get in with your hands to mix it.

Once mixed, let the dough rest for around 20 to 30 minutes. I’m not entirely sure what the resting actually does, but the biscuits do seem to come out better when the dough has had a bit of time to relax. Maybe biscuits need a breather too.

I then roll them into half golf ball size and squash down a little.

Preheat the oven to 180°C, then bake the biscuits for 20 to 25 minutes (fan oven).

Once they’re done, switch the oven off and leave the biscuits inside until they’ve cooled completely. You’re basically drying them out, which helps them store better and stops them going mouldy.

And that’s it. Simple, cheap, homemade dog treats that Hela absolutely adores, hope your pooch does too.

As with any homemade dog treat, feed in moderation and avoid adding salt, seasoning, onion, garlic, or anything else unsuitable for dogs.

From £5 to £1000: eBay Selling Experiment

Note: Only 15 days in and I've abandoned £5 to £1000 challenge for a more challenging experiment to make a million. Lets see how I do.

This is going to be a fun little big experiment.

I’ve spent many years working in marketing and ecommerce, and I’ve sold bits and pieces on eBay, Amazon, and Etsy before. Not recently though. It’s been a long, long time since I properly listed things, packed orders, watched prices, and tried to make a small margin.

I was recently asked by a mate, "how easy is it to make money from ebay?", from previous periods in my life when I have flirted with eBay sales, my answer was "Easy, and not easy".
You see it is easy to put stuff on there are selling, odds and sods can sell fairly easily, but doing it consistently isn't always easy.

So, an little experiemnt for myself, from today and from virtually a standing start, how easy would it be to make £1,000 on eBay, starting with as little as £5?

The idea is simple enough. I buy something cheaply, sell it for more, then reinvest the money back into the next purchase. No big stock buy. No pretending this is a business empire. Just a small rolling pot, a few sensible buys, and a bit of patience.

There is one extra wrinkle, though. I’m not doing this with a brand new eBay account, but I’m not exactly starting with a fully active seller account either.

The account I’ll be using has been dormant since October 2021, so eBay is treating it cautiously and at the moment, I’m restricted to 18 items and no more than £190 in sales each month. In practical terms, that means I’m pretty much starting from scratch.

I started by spending £5 in Tescos this morning on some hosepipe connectors. They feel like the sort of product that could work well on eBay: useful, small enough to post, not too fragile, and the kind of thing someone might search for when they need one rather than when they’re just browsing.

From previous experience, there are a few things worth remembering about eBay. It isn’t Amazon. The buyer mindset is different.

eBay buyers are often looking for value, something specific, something a bit unusual, or a replacement part they can’t easily find elsewhere. They’re also more aware of the individual seller. Feedback matters. Photos matter. A clear description matters. And I think interaction matters too. A quick, human reply can still make a difference.

Another key thing for me is postage. I’ll be offering free postage wherever possible because, rightly or wrongly, listings with free postage often feel simpler and more attractive to buyers.

Of course, free postage isn’t really free. It has to be built into the selling price, along with packaging, tape, envelopes, fees if they apply, and the original cost of the item.

That’s the part I want to track properly.

If I spend £6.50 and sell the items for £10, that doesn’t mean I’ve made £3.50. I need to take off postage, packing materials, and any selling costs. Only then do I know the real profit.

The challenge is to see whether I can grow a tiny starting pot into £1,000 by buying carefully, selling clearly, and reinvesting the profit rather than taking it out.

It might work. It might crawl along painfully slowly. I might discover that hosepipe connectors are the new Bitcoin, although probably not.

Either way, I’ll keep track of what I buy, what I sell, what I spend, and what the running pot looks like each month.

Before you start, please investigate your tax implications for a side hustle. 

How I’ll Track It

I don’t want this to become a vague “I think I made a bit of money” sort of challenge. If I’m going to do it, I might as well track it properly.

The important number isn’t sales. It’s the running value of stock and cash, which I'll report on at the end of each month and comment on what I bought and sold, simple as that ... now let’s see what happens.

Monthly Tally

Month End: June 2026

Stock and cash in hand

Current Value £41.64

Comments: The experiment has started way better than expected, just 3 weeks and made lots of sales on eBay, towards the end of the months some day I was getting 3-4 orders, so had to keep reinvesting the cash straight away. The account is still restricted because it has been dormant since October 2021, so the early aim is not just profit, but proving the account is active, reliable, and worth trusting again, it's like starting off from zero.

The current value is based on what eBay is showing, along with stock and cash in hand. I’ll keep tracking this each month to see whether the small starting pot is genuinely growing, or whether postage, packaging, and slow-moving stock quietly eat away at it.

The hosepipe connectors sold very well and gave me some cash to buy some products from the clearance aisle in my local Tescos (definitely an aisle worth checking out). I bought some Oral B brush heads that sold the same day and that allowed me to reinvest and get another pack the same day, that sold quickly again (both bought for £8 and sold for £13).

I had a few small odds and sods of drill bits and small cam buckle straps in the shed and not used, so I added them too, effectively cost me nothing, but worth adding for a tiny profit after postage to show eBay that its a trading account.  Spend just £4 on some small padded envelopes and this kind of plastic envelope, but I bought from Home Bargains!

Lessons Learnt

Small, light, useful, non-breakable, easy-to-post items feel like the best place to start.

I did do some promotions, and even at 2% (if a sale comes from a sponsored link in eBay, you only pay 2% of the sale price in a commission), by the and of the month I had 4 extra sales this way. 

Slightly overthink the Titles and fill them with keywords that potential buyers might use to find your product, so for example instead of "Easy-Fit Adjustable Garden Hose Adaptor for Round Mixer Taps", it should be written as "Universal Adjustable Garden Hose Tap Connector Mixer Adaptor 15-19mm No Thread".

Don't over think the eBay description, but have enough info on these that a potential buyer knows exactly what the are buying. I kept adding things like "Please check your tap size before ordering. This connector is suitable for taps from 15mm to 19mm in diameter." because I have had occasions in the past when buyers haven't checked the listing too well and ended up getting refunds because products didn't fit.

In eBay postage, exclude the following areas as they increase postage costs (Northern Ireland, Isle of Man, Scottish Highlands / North Scotland, Scottish Islands / West coast, Isle of Wight and the Isles of Scilly.

Don't think that products have to sell in a day or two and fiddle with the price, bringing it down until it sells, if have put it on eBay for a fair price that gives you the profit you want, leave it, it will eventually sell.

Should Age Checks Start With the Phone?

There’s been a lot written in the popular press about children accessing social media platforms and pornography, and about the need for these platforms to carry out some form of age verification.

There’s also the wider question of whether underage children should have certain features throttled back on their smartphones, or whether they should be allowed to use these devices in exactly the same way as adults.

I do agree that social media platforms and websites have a responsibility to be more vigilant when it comes to protecting children. That feels obvious enough.

But I do wonder if we’re missing a trick with the devices themselves.

Surely it can’t be too difficult for age verification to happen on the phone itself, tied to the device and the person using it. The phone could then carry that age status with it and decide which sites, apps, and platforms it is allowed to connect to, or which features should be restricted.

That wouldn’t mean social media companies, adult sites, app stores, or messaging platforms get to wash their hands of the issue. They still have a role to play in keeping children safe.

But device-level age verification could add another layer of protection around the content children see, the messages they receive, and the platforms they can access.

I’m sure there are privacy, security, and practical issues I haven’t thought through yet. There probably always are with this kind of thing.

But as a seed of an idea, I think it’s worth looking into.

We;; this turned into a very timely post, within about four hours of me putting this post live, the BBC News reported that "Starmer tells Apple and Google to ban nude images on children's phones".

The article was a little bit interesting, as before I read it (and not being a fan of Apple products), I didn't realised that Apple has already age-verified its UK users and even offers a blocking service for several of its own apps including iMessage; so the technology is out there, we do just need the tech companies to step up to the plate and help protect the youngest in society.

Doom Scrolling and the Slot Machine Effect

There are a lot of people talking about the addictive nature of social media platforms, especially the idea of doom scrolling.

That endless feed is a geat design for these platforms, you never really get to the end of it. There’s always another post, another video, another opinion, another tiny hit of something. Good, bad, funny, annoying, useful, pointless. It just keeps coming. Very good engineering design that does make these platforms "addictive", not sure if addictive is the right term, or whether they are just designed to make it hard to stop!

I had a thought earlier about whether social media platforms are built with some of the same ideas as slot machines.

Slot machines can be addictive because they offer the possibility of a “win”. You pull the lever, or press the button, and maybe this time something good happens. Maybe this time you get the reward.

And I wonder whether doom scrolling works in a similar way.

You keep scrolling because the next great piece of content might be just one swipe away. Most of what you see might be rubbish, irritating, repetitive, or forgettable, but every now and then you find something that makes you laugh, teaches you something, shocks you, or gives you that little feeling of reward, that little hit of endorphins, which is probably the same as that slot machine win.

This is only a seed post for now, because I need to read more about it properly, but I do think there’s something interesting here. The endless scroll might not just be convenient design. It might be one of the reasons these platforms are so hard to put down.

We Basically Invented Google (kinda)

In the mid-1990s, I worked in the Marketing Department at BT in Leeds.

We were based at Butts Court at the time, and one of my mates there was Jason, better known as “Caratacus”.

For some reason, the two of us had got into the habit of thinking up questions during the morning. Not useful questions, necessarily, just odd little things we suddenly wanted answers to.

Who was that actor in that film? Where did a certain phrase come from? Who sang a particular song? What was the capital of somewhere obscure? The sort of thing that would now be settled in about four seconds on your phone, before anyone had even finished arguing about it.

But this was the mid-90s. The internet existed, technically, but not in any useful way for two lads sat in an office in Leeds trying to settle a lunchtime curiosity.

So we had our own system.

At lunchtime, we’d nip round the corner to Waterstones and start looking through the books until we found the answer.

Reference books, film books, dictionaries, atlases, encyclopaedias, whatever looked like it might do the job. We didn’t buy them, obviously. We just used Waterstones as a sort of analogue search engine with nice carpets.

And the thing is, it worked.

Ask a question. Search the available information. Find the most likely source. Check the answer. Report back with entirely unearned confidence.

Basically, Jason “Caratacus” and myself invented Google a couple of years before Google officially existed.

Admittedly, our version involved walking around the corner, manually browsing shelves, and trying not to look like we were treating a bookshop as a free research department.

But the core concept was there.

So yes, I’m not saying Larry Page and Sergey Brin stole our idea.

I’m just saying that if they’d been in Waterstones in Leeds in about 1996, they might have seen the future.

The Palms of Ocracoke (Mild Horror)

This story started while I was on holiday in Spain, staring at the palm trees opposite the Bali beds we had by the pool.

Right at the top, where the fan-shaped leaves meet the trunk, the crowns looked strangely dark. For a second I thought I saw movement up there. It was probably a bird. Probably.

But then I started wondering ...  what if something lived up there? Something humanoid, but not quite human. A spirit, maybe. Someone lost. Something waiting.

That tiny thought became The Palms of Ocracoke.

Nobody on Ocracoke liked being near the palm grove after dark.

The strange thing was that even on still evenings, when the sea air had completely died away, the fronds at the very tops of the trees still seemed to move.

The villagers had plenty of explanations for it. None of them good.

Some said a demon lived among the crowns of the trees. Others claimed to have seen something small and human-shaped moving through the darkness above them.

Whatever the truth, most people gave the grove a wide berth.

Maeve never paid much attention to the stories.

Fear had lost most of its meaning 15 years ago.

During a violent autumn storm, a sudden flood had torn through the island’s low gullies. Her 7-year-old son, a bright, spirited boy with a shock of red hair, had vanished in the deluge.

His body was never found.

The village assumed the current had swept him out to sea. Maeve had spent the years since waiting for a knock on the door that would never come.

On the 15th anniversary of the storm, Maeve walked into the palm grove for the first time.

The mud sucked at her boots. The air was thick with damp earth, salt, and rotting vegetation. Above her, the palm crowns shifted in the dark, even though the air was still.

She kept walking.

At the end of a narrow gully, the trees seemed to gather closer together. Their trunks leaned inward, as though they were listening.

Then something moved above her.

Maeve looked up.

In the crowded crown of the nearest palm, the shadows twisted. A small figure stepped out from behind the trunk and stared down at her.

Maeve didn’t scream. She didn’t run.

She looked at the figure and felt a strange, sudden ache in her chest.

“Please,” she whispered into the dark. “Don’t be afraid.”

The figure froze.

Then a sudden rush of wind swept down from the fronds.

It struck Maeve.

There was no violence in it. Instead, a flood of memory, fear, and grief burst through her mind.

The spirit entered her and was instantly overwhelmed by the weight of her sorrow. For 15 years, he had been a lost and lonely thing in the dark, acting out only because he wanted to be seen. Now, through her, he understood the hole he had left behind.

He felt her sleepless nights. Her refusal to leave the island. Her fierce, stubborn love that had never faded.

And Maeve felt him.

She saw his final moments on the day of the storm. The roar of floodwater tearing through the gully. His small hands gripping the slick bark of a palm tree as the water rose around him. The awful snap of wood. The suffocating rush of mud and debris that buried him before he could cry out for her.

He hadn’t been washed out to sea.

He had been here all along.

Trapped between worlds. Terrified. Homesick.

Maeve wrapped her arms tightly around herself, holding the spirit within her as though she were holding him as a child again.

Tears streamed down her face, but she smiled through them.

“I’ve got you,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. It wasn’t your fault, my sweet boy. It was just the storm. You can rest now. Momma’s here.”

She gave him everything she had left. Every ounce of love, forgiveness, and peace she had carried through all those years.

And at last, the boy stopped fighting the pull of the afterlife.

The cold fear that had gripped his soul for over a decade began to thaw.

He let go.

By morning, the fog had lifted from the grove.

The villagers found Maeve on her knees in the mud at the end of the gully, calm and tear-streaked, staring at the earth between her hands.

There, pushing through the damp soil, was a tiny palm sapling.

It was unlike any other tree in the grove.

While the rest of the palms were deep green, the very top of this young plant, where the fan leaves were just beginning to form, carried a bright, unmistakable shock of crimson.

Maeve gently touched the red frond.

“He’s home,” she whispered to the quiet forest. “He’s finally home.”

The village never feared the palm grove again.

In the years that followed, the old stories changed. People no longer spoke of demons in the crowns of the trees. Instead, they spoke of the boy who was lost, the mother who found him, and the strange little red-crowned palm that grew in the place where love had finally reached through the dark.