Here’s another observation test for you. Does the pub pictured below sell food?

Not sure? Have a look at a different view of the same pub.

Still not sure? How about now?

One final picture in case you’re still dithering,

The answer? Well, I’ve been to this pub, the Cross Keys in Witney, a grand total of three times. The first time was with my husband and his parents on a Saturday at lunchtime. We were hoping to enjoy some of the “great value food” the signs keep banging on about, but it was not to be. We walked in and were told they weren’t serving food because the kitchen had just had a big delivery that would take hours to sort out. We went to a different pub.

Here’s a little test of your observation skills: how much would you expect to pay for one of the bottles of tea-tree oil pictured?

If you said £3.09, you’re wrong. If you said £4.09, I can see that you’ve worked out this is a trick question, but you’re also wrong.

Don’t worry, I got it wrong too. I bought one of the bottles of tea-tree oil from that shelf and I didn’t realise until I left the shop that I’d been charged £7.79 for it.

In my previous post, I set out the problems I had with Nationwide’s internet banking. In brief: it took me six months to get to the point where I could actually log in and do something with my own money. What I tried to do then was to transfer money into the HSBC account I share with my husband, so that we could pay our (Nationwide) mortgage. As my previous post makes clear, this proved impossible because Nationwide required me to use a card reader to carry out the transfer, and the card reader didn’t work.

Just over a year ago, I took what I thought was my first step towards more ethical banking: I opened a Nationwide current account. Before I opened the account, I made sure to ask about the internet banking. Did it work? Was it straightforward? Easy online banking was one of the few things I liked about my old HSBC account, and I wanted to be sure Nationwide would offer the same thing. I was assured that Nationwide’s internet banking was very easy to use and naively, I believed it.

The phone rings. You answer, and there’s a tell-tale pause, a pause in which you can often hear the call-centre buzz on the other end. The pause might be because the telemarketing phone system has auto-dialled you before the employee was ready, or it might be because they’re ringing from another continent, or it might be because they’ve got distracted waiting for you to answer. Whatever the reason, it tells you in a second or two, before anybody speaks, that this is probably a telemarketing call.

I have an idea to change the bottom half of the internet.

Lots of blogs, including mine, use captchas to prevent robot spam, but these are powerless in the face of human stupidity and aggression. Many other blogs moderate comments before publication, but this makes work for the blog owner, and that work is often very tedious.

My post on blood pressure testing is about visual feedback, so before I uploaded it I tried to find a picture to illustrate what I was saying.

When you get your blood pressure taken at the doctor’s, what do you see?

When I think of blood pressure readings I imagine numbers on a display, but my actual experience of blood pressure measurement is different.

Not once, in all my years of visiting the doctor, have I seen the front of a blood pressure monitor in the surgery. It’s always positioned so that the doctor can see the numbers, but I can’t.

Today I discovered that the front wheel of my bike had been stolen. It must have been an easy crime to carry out; the bike was parked at Oxford train station with just the frame locked to the stand. It probably only took the thief a few minutes to get the wheel off.

I was tempted not to bother reporting it to the police because I know very well that I won’t get the wheel back, but I decided I didn’t want this crime, however small, to be invisible.

The first time somebody asked me for advice about how to get started as a freelancer, I nearly fell over. I think my response was: “Why are you asking me?” I’ve never felt as if I’m doing it right. That might be Impostor Syndrome talking, but it might just be the fact that there is no "right" way of doing it.