What a lovely way to spend a Saturday afternoon, lying on the bed watching “The Lady Vanishes”, unquestionably one of my favourite films. It was shown on BBC2 yesterday. My son, who turns 12 next week, was in and out of the bedroom at various times and couldn’t be persuaded to watch the whole thing,… Continue reading “The Lady Vanishes”
We learn from our mistakes, or so we’re told. I must have made plenty of mistakes at primary school, writing letters the wrong way round, or mis-spelling words like “special”, but I don’t remember any of that, and any evidence of these things is long gone. There are two things that I recall getting wrong… Continue reading Things I got wrong at primary school
The clocks go back this weekend. It means that October is always the longest month of the year. It has 31 days, and an extra hour, on this last weekend of the month. I always recall the equivalent weekend from my second year at university, back in the 1980s. The college library was only open… Continue reading The clocks go back
At the start of the year I wrote a few pieces about Earworms, and even created a Category for them because it looked they would be crop up at least once a month. Since the summer there have been fewer tunes occupying my mind, unprompted, and their place seems to have taken by jokes. Back… Continue reading A joke instead of an earworm: the Trappist monk
According to the Oxford Dictionary of English, on my Kindle App, lackadaisical means “lacking enthusiasm and determination; carelessly lazy”. The OED gives this example: “a lackadaisical defence left Spurs adrift in the second half”. The same source defines the word lax as “not sufficiently strict, severe, or careful”. There is no such word as “laxadaisical”,… Continue reading Word of the week: lackadaisical
My father’s approach to education can be summed up in two ways. The first relates to how he would respond to gaps in our childhood knowledge. Typically he would say, “How come you didn’t know that? Jesus Christ, I knew that when I was your age.” The second was his response if I shared a… Continue reading My father’s approach to education
When my brother got married, in Spain in the 1980s, there were still substantial savings to be made at duty free stores when flying to Europe. A few of us travelled from Gatwick to Alicante and bought two bottles of duty-free Veuve Cliquot champagne in a rather attractive (and heavily discounted) gift set. It was,… Continue reading “When my brother was at Cambridge he drank this [Veuve Cliquot] every day”
Bob Dylan is the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Good. I’m happy about that. As I wrote in a piece last year I have friends who have told me how much they hate Bob Dylan. I am still friends with these people but we are never going to agree on this one.… Continue reading Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate
Today is the Feast of St Edward the Confessor. He was the last king of England who was also a saint. His death in 1066 led to rival claims for the English throne, the Battle of Hastings and, on Christmas Day that year, the coronation of William the Conqueror as king. You might have known… Continue reading Edward the Confessor
In this earlier piece I asked the following question, regarding the names of stations on the London Underground: What is the smallest number of stations that you would need to make sure that all 26 letters of the alphabet are included at least once? The question arose from the answer to my favourite trivia question:… Continue reading Tube Station Pangrams (a Solution)
