“When I woke up the next day I was a different guy”. For me that is the most memorable sentence from Keith Richards’s “Life”. It describes the effect on him of hearing Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” on Radio Luxembourg one night. As it says on page 58 of my hardback edition: “That was the stunner.… Continue reading “When I woke up the next day I was a different guy”
When I was 13 my mother brought home a reading list from my school’s parents’ evening. It was on the kitchen table the following morning. I guess that they gave the list to parents so that they could see what was expected of their children, and to make sure that the list made it home.… Continue reading A Teenage Reading List
There are many uses of the word “interstitial”. I use it in the context of time. “Interstitial” means “of or relating to an interstice or interstices”, and an interstice can be defined simply as an interval or intervening space. This definition from Dictionary.com goes further: a small or narrow space or interval between things or… Continue reading Word of the week: interstitial
One of my local tube stations here in West London is Stamford Brook. In the late 1990s the Dutch international footballer Jaap Stam played in the Premiership, for Manchester United. At the other end of the tube network, near Cockfosters, where the Piccadilly Line ends, is a station called Southgate. England international Gareth Southgate also… Continue reading Footballers on the Underground
Mean, median, mode: does an understanding of these statistical terms count as Universal Knowledge? Can most adults be expected to know the difference, and why you would use one statistical measurement rather than another? In my experience, probably not. We can conclude that plenty of people are unfamiliar with basic statistics because the word “average”… Continue reading Mean, Median, Mode
Some time ago we tried to explain to our children the derivation of the phrase “This is where we came in”. As I understand it this comes from how people used to go to the cinema before my lifetime, when they didn’t pay too much attention to start and end times. They would buy their… Continue reading “This is where we came in”
Tottenham Court Road station has changed dramatically. Earlier this week I took the train there and exited from the station for the first time in over 18 months, the first time since all the major refurbishments began. It’s a station I used to know well, and never liked it much: the small, grubby ticket hall… Continue reading Central London Changes
We were talking at the weekend about the concept of “micromorts” and “microlives”. I had read about it sometime over the last year in the New Scientist and have just dug out that copy of the magazine. I was surprised to find that it was nearly a year ago (the 30 May 2015 edition). I… Continue reading Micromorts and Microlives (an introduction)
Once again my 9 year old daughter’s homework has prompted me to think about language and learning, as in earlier pieces about Adverbs and Homophones. She has studied apostrophes before and it was part of her homework again last week. It’s a good example of something where the broad principles are straightforward, and can be… Continue reading Apostrophes
Concordance: it’s both an abstract noun (something you can’t see, hear or touch) and a concrete noun (something you can see, hear or touch). An alternative description for a concrete noun is “something that you can put in a wheelbarrow” (though it might need to be a very big wheelbarrow). The abstract meaning of concordance… Continue reading Word of the week: concordance
The Compartments 