His life settled into a grim routine.

THE grim routine is the same in every spy case.

At the shattered restaurant, there was normality, too, or at least the pursuit of grim routine.

New York City's jailers are convinced that many prisoners go to clinics as a social occasion, as a break in the grim routine - and no doubt some do.

Quite fun, really--rather a change from the usual grim routine.

The programme has got two key ingredients: offering hope and much greater help finding work, and, most immediately, an alternative to the grim routine of an arranged knife fight every Friday night.

Eitan Tivoni, who sells cassettes and shoes at a nearby stand, said the repeated attacks in and around Jaffa Road had created a kind of grim routine.

But for thousands of homeless children, the holidays mean only slight variation in a grim routine - a token gift from some charity's Santa Claus, glimpses of New Year's revelry on television.

At the Bondobush mine here, the grim routine of mining is on daily display - hundreds of diggers sifting through tons of gravel.

As Li clocks out, another worker takes his seat, takes control of his avatar and carries on with the same grim routines amid the warrior monks of Azeroth.