This is the index to wills and administrations from the Principal Probate Registry. When someone dies, their estate has to be disposed of. If they left a will, one or more executors are appointed to carry out its instructions. If they died intestate, an “administration” is granted and, again, executors divvy up the estate. This legal process is recorded in the Registry.

The index can be used to request a specific will from the records, but even without this the information held is of great interest to family historians. An index entry generally gives a date of death, last residence, executor and their profession (often the next of kin), and the value of the effects of the deceased.

Not only does the new index place this information online (I used to visit First Avenue House in Holborn to search the records which wasn’t exactly convenient when I lived in Scotland), but it also provides a digital index, massively speeding up the search process.

There are plenty of reasons why a search might not turn up a result: many people simply didn’t have the assets to warrant it; early on, wives’ property was considered to belong to their husbands; and the indexation is by no means perfect.

That said, I’ve already found lots of relatives in the new data. The extra information compared with death record indexes means you can be surer you’ve found the right person and I’ve been able to (excuse the morbidity) “kill off” a number of people.

There were a couple of records that took me by surprise, however. In both cases, it was the identity of the executors that was unexpected.

My first cousin, four times removed:

GIBBS Emmanuel of Thanksgiving-lane Binfield Heath Oxfordshire died 2 May 1938 Probate Oxford 6 July to Martha Ann Gibbs widow the right honourable Godfrey Walter baron Phillimore and the honourable Anthony Phillimore lieutenant H.M. army. Effects £624 6s. 5d.

Quite why three executors were required to handle the assets of a deceased bricklayer, and why two of the executors should be the 2nd Lord Phillimore and his son, are beyond me at the moment.

My first cousin, thrice removed:

ROBINSON William Thomas of Foxhil Wanborough Wiltshire died 1 July 1918 Probate London 9 October to Frank Curzon theatre proprietor. Effects £15556 18s.

Frank Curzon was a successful Edward theatre manager and William Thomas Robinson was a race horse trainer, with no obvious connection to the theatre. But Frank Curzon’s Wikipedia page notes he bred race horses, including an Epsom Derby winner, so that seems the likely explanation. And yes, £16k was a lot of money in those days…

You can search the probate indexes here, but I suspect you’ll need an Ancestry subscription to look at the scanned pages.

I’ve just been to my local Sainsbury’s which – until today – seemed behind the times when it came to point of sale technology. The Tesco by my office has them. The giant Sainsbury’s down the road has them. But today, for the first time, I was able to use self-service checkout machines at my local supermarket.

They’re brilliant. I mean, they’re awful if there’s an unexpected item in the bagging area, if you can’t find your un-barcoded item in the menus, if you’re trying to buy alcohol and there’s no-one around to authorise it, or if they’re just set REALLY LOUD – but they’re brilliant. Scan. Pack. Scan. Pack. Scan. Pack. Pay.

No-one asking how many of my own bags I’ve brought along. (One.) No-one asking if I have a Nectar card. (No. So bringing my own bag was entirely motivated by envirosmuggery.) No-one criticising my choice of toilet roll. (Yes, that happened.)

Even shopping online involves some human interaction as you have to get the stuff delivered. Self-service checkouts save my having to communicate with another human being entirely, and I still get the shopping immediately.

This is the day that I longed for.

I have a nagging feeling that this technological advance might result in fewer jobs at the store… But let’s assume the checkout staff have just been reassigned to other duties.

And anyway, this is about me.

I went a long time without playing Bejeweled. And then, last year, I got an iPhone and discovered the Bejewled iPhone app. Brilliant: you can play by touching the screen – much easier than with a mouse or trackpad. And, even better, the app could connect to Facebook so you could still play your friends.

My competitive side got the better of me. I was hooked. Again. Train journeys in particular were given over to playing Bejeweled. And I was good. I often topped the weekly league of my friends. I got lots of medals and stuff.

And then I started thinking that maybe I could be doing something with all that time. Apart from a sense of satisfaction and general superiority – and let’s not underestimate that – the game achieves nothing. Possibly it keeps my brain in shape, but I doubt it; it’s no kakuro. It occurred to me that train journeys could be better spent reading teh internets, or a book, or just thinking – which sounds wet but isn’t, as Lord Arnopp explains.

So today I have removed Bejeweled from my phone. This will be welcome news to those I have conquered. I judge not ye who choose to retain it, but no longer shall I allow it to sap my time.

I’m free! Free to read! Free to think! Free to use my time for positive, life-affirming ends!

So I’ve just installed Carcassonne…

I made the mistake of carrying on reading. The next speaker was the Labour MP for Stirling, Anne McGuire. She began:

I congratulate all Members who have delivered their maiden speeches. I was going to say that my contribution would be an older maiden speech, but one of those adjectives would not quite be appropriate. I shall now launch forward while leaving Members to work out the meaning of that remark.

Please send the mind bleach.

However, it’s not all bad news. I’ll be live tweeting along with the Eurovision final on Saturday night on my twitter account, so much of the, er, insight that usually finds its way onto this blog will be available there. Watch out for numerous Blake’s 7 references.

You can also fill this blog-post-sized hole with my contribution to this week’s Pod Delusion podcast. You’ll find me wittering on about Eurovision (recorded in one take I’ll have you know) around 26 minutes in:

Finally, don’t forget to tune in yourself to BBC One at 8pm on Saturday (or some red buttony thing that I don’t have that gives you the lyric subtitles). I’ll be backing Denmark. Or maybe Romania. Or maybe Albania. I haven’t quite made up my mind. And whereas last year I correctly predicted (for once) that Norway would storm to victory, there’s no such obvious victor this year.

Today’s list is a quick list of things to remember about General Election polling day:

• It’s on Thursday (6th May).
• Polls open at 7am and close at 10pm.
• In many places there are local elections on the same day.
• If you’re eligible to vote, you should have had a polling card from your council telling you where your polling station is. If you haven’t had one and you think you should be able to vote, give them a call as soon as possible.
• You don’t need your polling card to vote, but it helps the polling station staff if you have it.
• If you have a postal vote and haven’t returned it yet, get it in the post asap. It has to arrive with the council before the polls close on Thursday.
• If you still have your postal vote on polling day, you can take it – sealed in its envelope – to your local polling station, or to your local council.
• When you vote, put a cross in the box for the candidate you want to vote for (or, for local elections where you have more than one vote, the boxes of the candidates you want to vote for). Don’t write anything else on the ballot paper or you risk it being spoilt.
• After the polls close, the ballot boxes will be taken to the count location. First, the council will check that the number of ballot papers in each ballot box matches the number of ballot papers given to voters. Then the votes will be counted.
• Most counts for the General Election are taking place on Thursday night. Get an estimate of when the result will be announced for your constituency from the Press Association.

So here we go. The previous five years’ figures are in brackets, last year’s first.

• 3 (3, 2, 2, 2, 2): number of servers this site has been hosted on
• 2 (2, 2, 2, 2, 2): number of blogging applications used
• 1,157 (1,123, 977, 873, 588, 226): total number of posts
• 1,742 (1,614, 1,518, 1,350, 774, 444): total number of comments
• 1.51 (1.44, 1.55, 1.55, 1.32, 1.96): average number of comments per post
• 137,317 (112,651, 70,993, 43,016, 6,322): total unique hits

Top seven referring websites (excluding search engines):

• 7 (-): Derren Brown
• 6 (5): British Blogs
• 5 (6): Nothing Tra La La?
• 4 (7): Liberal England
• 3 (3): LibDem Blogs
• 2 (-): Facebook
• 1 (2): Twitter

(With two new entries there, the sites that dropped from the chart were Lib Dem Voice and Wikipedia – last year’s number one referrer.)

Top nine referring blogs:

• 9 (-): Wulfweard the White
• 8 (-): The Pod Delusion
• 7 (7): Andrew Reeves’ Running Blog
• 6 (8): Naked Blog
• 5 (5): Love and Liberty
• 4 (-): Mark Pack
• 3 (-): Derren Brown
• 2 (2): Nothing Tra La La?
• 1 (3): Liberal England

(I should point out that those Derren Brown referrals came from someone in his comments, not the scary brain man himself.)

Top ten search terms:

• 10 (-): “derren brown” lottery
• 9 (-): hut 33
• 8 (-): barry letters
• 7 (-): derren brown lottery how
• 6 (-): eurovision 2009 island
• 5 (-): top 10 iphone apps
• 4 (-): darren brown lottery
• 3 (-): derren brown lottery prediction
• 2 (1): eurovision 2009
• 1 (-): derren brown lottery

Turns out that lottery song brought in much of the last year’s traffic. Other choice searches from the top 30 include toby stephens (finally out of the top 10); freebmd; karaoke circus; and colin jeavons.

I’ll try to be on time next year.

• First new TV story I saw: possibly Time and the Rani (I think can remember the giant brain) but if not then certainly something from season 25
• First novelisation I read: The Daemons
• First VHS I saw: probably Death to the Daleks (with Pyramids of Mars and Spearhead from Space around the same time)
• First new TV story I saw as a self-defined fan: Dimensions in Time. Ho hum.
• First novelisation I read: The Daemons by Barry Letts
• First New Adventure I read: Nightshade by Mark Gatiss
• First issue of Doctor Who Magazine I bought: don’t know the number but was probably around 1993 and had Sylvester McCoy in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy on the cover. I bought it from a small newsagent at the edge of the pedestrianised shopping precinct in Tunbridge Wells.
• First VHS I bought: The Keeper of Traken, at the end of 1992. Also bought in Tunbridge Wells, in the WH Smith in the Victoria centre. What useless things we remember.
• First convention I went to: Blue Box III in Southampton in 1994.
• First Doctor who’s younger than me: Matt Smith.

• From House of Cards:
  • Charles Henry Collingridge – Margaret Thatcher’s successor, who makes the mistake of leaving Francis Urquhart unpromoted
  • Francis Urquhart – F.U. himself, a ruthless right-wing PM brought brilliantly to life by Ian Richardson
• Maureen Graty – the British PM who appears briefly in the sixth season of The West Wing, played by Pamela Salem – and as far as I know, fact fans, she’s the only actor from either Doctor Who or Blake’s 7 to have appeared in The West Wing
• Michael Phillips – Robert Bathurst’s occupant of Number 10 in the BBC sitcom My Dad’s the Prime Minister
• Tom Davis – second PM (and the first named) in The Thick of It, although he’s not seen on screen
• From the Doctor Who universe:
  • “Jeremy” – the PM during The Green Death – assumed to be former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe
  • “Madam” – there’s a female PM on the phone in Terror of the Zygons – possibly Shirley Williams
  • Joseph Green – MP for Hartley Dale and acting PM in World War Three, although he’s actually Jocrassa Fel Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen in disguise
  • Harriet Jones – Penelope Wilton’s MP for Flydale North, she is Prime Minister in The Christmas Invasion
  • Harold Saxon – John Simm as the Master, perhaps having benefited from the Doctor’s quiet overthrowing of Harriet Jones
  • Brian Green – played by Nicholas Farrell (also of To Play the King), he was PM during Torchwood: Children of Earth
• Kevin Pork – in Whoops Apocalypse, portrayed by Peter Jones
• Ros Pritchard – Jane Horrocks’s eponymous character in The Amazing Mrs Pritchard (which prompted a lot of discussion on Lib Dem Voice)
• From The Pallisers:
  • Joshua Monk – Liberal PM in Trollope’s The Duke’s Children, played by Bryan Pringle
  • The Duke of Omnium – from Trollope’s The Prime Minster, played by Philip Latham
• Michael Stevens – Anthony Head’s PM in Little Britain
• Harry Perkins – the star of A Very British Coup, Ray McAnally’s socialist PM is almost the diametrical opposite of Francis Urquhart (the book was by Chris Mullin, subsequently a Labour MP himself but standing down this year)
• Jim Hacker – last but by no means least, Paul Eddington takes the title role in Yes, Prime Minister, one of the best sitcoms ever made

And here’s a fact I stumbled across while checking the information in this list – the replica House of Commons often seen in TV dramas since the 1980s was built for the ITV adaptation of First Among Equals and is now owned by TV writer Paul Abbott.