A colleague was (possibly still is) due to complete on a house purchase tomorrow. Lunchtime today his solicitor told him that the person at the bottom of the chain was having difficulty transferring money and completion may not happen. The problem seems to be that this person is in the USA and has only just discovered that he can transfer only £10,000 per day. Technically if they don't complete they (and everyone else in the chain) is in breach of contract and I think that as it is this one person's fault, he may well be responsible for everyone's additional costs. Would probably be cheaper for him to fly back from the USA overnight to sort it out.

Of course, in reality, this sort of thing could happen any day, and we only apply special significance to it because it happens to occur on a particular day of the week and a particular date of the month. Or it could just be that my colleague is unlucky. After all, he was the person who went to the USA to get married but had his wedding cancelled because of a hurricane.

I went to a wedding myself at the weekend (see what I did there? A link that would be worthy of a Radio 4 continuity announcer). My self-adopted niece. Because I am her self-adopted uncle, we were placed on the family table with other (real) uncles and aunts.

It was a good day. Lovely setting, beautiful weather, good meal, bit of a boogie afterwards (and the disco didn't fall in to the usual trap of playing so loudly that no one could talk), and they'd laid on a bit of entertainment (archery and saxophone quintet - not in the same room) for the low period between end of wedding breakfast and start of evening party. And an ice cream man (with bicycle). The couple had put a lot of thought into what they wanted and put some nice personal touches into the decorations. They are both involved in scouting, so the bunting was scouting neckers (I said neckers, not knickers), tables were named after scouting camp sites, and place cards were written on tent pegs.

I was temporarily surprised when I saw that the photos posted on Farcebook were pretty similar to the photos I had taken. Then I realised we had all photographed the set pieces arranged by the photographer - of course they were the same!

The invitation for the company (well, departmental) Christmas Do has been distributed. It was sent at 4.00 on Monday, and by Tuesday the organiser was complaining about the slow response. Well come on, give people a chance. I, of course, responded very promptly.

I've been having fun with fractals and, specifically Sierpinski gaskets. They're quite easy to draw.

Start with a triangle.

Draw an upside-down triangle in the middle

Draw upside down triangles in each of the three triangles surrounding that one

Draw upside-down triangles in the triangles around those. And so on

You can keep going like that indefinitely (or until you run out of space or - in my case - get bored. You can probably tell by that last picture that I was being less precise about the accuracy of drawing (and that I started form the bottom and worked up).

But - and here's the really exciting and geeky thing. You can make the same pattern mathematically.

Make a point anywhere in the triangle. Randomly select one of the three corners and put a second point midway from your point to that corner. Randomly select another corner (or even the same one - it could be, it's random) and do the same thing. Do this lots of times (I did it in excel - it's quite easy with a bit of trigonometry and knowledge of Excel formulae) and plot the results. Hey presto - you get the same shape.

Isn't that amazing?

Of course, my geekiness had to go on to see if the principle extends to a rectangle. It doesn't.