A lavish lunch and exotic drinks… all when he should be working

• Copywriter enjoys his second meal of the day
• Secret sandwich in intimate writer’s retreat

He’s supposed to be working for clients but copywriter Mark Bridge has been spotted eating lunch instead.

Sources have told how the self-employed scribe made himself a sandwich before carrying it back to his desk.

The writer also found time to boil his retro-style kettle and make a cup of rare Rooibos tea, brewed from leaves only found in South Africa’s fynbos region and enjoyed by many other glamorous A-listers. Controversially, he was seen to add milk to the drink.

Left-over pork from Thursday’s dinner was combined with spicy sweet chilli sauce in a pitta bread, leaving some to suggest Mr Bridge had been taking culinary tips from celebrity chefs like Jamie and Nigella.

He started writing professionally more than ten years ago, although creativity was clearly in the blood as childhood friends tell how he’d pretended to be a newspaper reporter from a very young age.

Mr Bridge was unavailable for comment today.

Will cease, comma...

The GP surgery used by my mum has changed the way it organises appointments for patients. She's been given a printed leaflet that ends "Our current arrangement with two local practices will cease to enable us to provide continuity of care for our registered patients."

The receptionist is hand-writing a comma in the final sentence before she hands each leaflet out.

Britain's Secret Shoppers

I'm him off the telly. Yes, that's me - credited as Mark Bridge, Technology Writer - offering some mobile phone shopping tips on the Channel 4 "Britain's Secret Shoppers" television programme. A few appeared in tonight's show and I'm expecting to see some more next week. Meanwhile, if you missed it, the series is on 4oD for a while.

A couple of gems from the Advertising Standards Authority

There are some absolute gems in the Advertising Standards Authority adjudications released today.

It’s good news for Honda...

We considered that viewers would recognise that the action of driving towards a supernatural opening portal was not realistic behaviour

...and good news for Converse, too.

We noted that one woman was wearing her bikini near palm trees and another appeared to be having a water fight, which suggested circumstances where women might ordinarily be in bikinis

CD review: Not Waving, But Drowning by The Self Help Group

CD review from Viva Lewes magazine, February 2013:

Not Waving, But Drowning sits firmly in the centre of the melodic Venn diagram embracing alt-country, folk and gentle rock music. If it were a place, it would be Laurel Canyon – the Los Angeles suburb where Crosby, Stills & Nash sang about a very, very, very fine house. Yet this album was born in Sussex; five-piece band The Self Help Group is based in Brighton, while Lewes’s Union Music Store produced the recordings. Each track has the warmth of Californian sunshine, with bright harmonies and rhythmic guitars partnered by lyrics that move from joyful humour to almost unbearable sadness. Despite the heartbreak, I can't stop listening.

The album costs £11.99 and is released on Monday 11 February. Needles, the first single from the album, can be found on iTunes and on YouTube.

Lewes weather

I've just discovered that the Met Office offers a website widget. I don't really have any reason to embed it here but... well...

This Weather Widget is provided by the Met Office

The mystery of writing

I've just been reading a blog post from last year by writer/artist Austin Kleon. It's entitled 'Writing: it doesn’t get any easier' and talks about the late David Rakoff, who'd described the challenge of writing as being like "having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food".

That's enormously reassuring

Back in spring 2011, when reading 'The Writing Life' by Annie Dillard, I suddenly realised I didn't know how to be a copywriter. I could do it... but I couldn't really explain how I did it, so wasn't sure if I was doing it 'right'. Perhaps there was a better way.

In the movie of my life, this would be the part where Nicolas Cage (who's playing me) sees a beam of light shining through the bedroom curtains. He leaps from his bed and runs to his well-stocked library, scrabbling to find copies of advertising classics; dog-eared editions by Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, Drayton Bird and Philip Kotler. He pulls them from the shelves and sits on the floor reading them as the sun rises outside.

In the film, Nicolas Cage would find some kind of revelation and would walk off into a warm orange sunrise with a mug of coffee in his hand. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised he'd be missing the point.