This time last year (late July 2015) we were getting ready for our holiday, a trip to France and Italy by car. We went by ferry from Dover to Dunkirk (Dunquerque as the French spell it). We decided to travel that way because of the lengthy delays on the Eurotunnel. Cars and lorries were backed… Continue reading Holiday timings
Earlier this month I wrote about film titles which are displayed above cinemas in movies, in scenes set in the past. The sight of “Spartacus” in the recent Oscar winner “Bridge of Spies” places the action in the early 1960s. Similarly, cinemas showing “The Godfather” (in “Field of Dreams”) and “The Poseidon Adventure” (in “Milk”)… Continue reading “The Bells of St Mary’s”
Our 9-year-old daughter is learning the words to the old Queen song “Killer Queen” at her Friday evening children’s theatre group. They have changed one of the lines, from “Let them eat cake, she says / Just like Marie Antoinette” to “Let them eat cake, she says / Shopping on the internet”. The opening line… Continue reading Queen, Sparks, 10cc: Moet, kimonos and lasagne
A news item on the radio this morning (and in this story from the BBC website) tells us that Mick Jagger’s girlfriend is expecting a baby. Do I have to describe Jagger as “the singer of the Rolling Stones”? Surely not; he’s been in the news for over 50 years and must count as Universal… Continue reading “He’s his own grandpa”
A pronoun is, simply, a word that takes the place of a noun. He, she, you, they and it are all pronouns. They (pronouns) can cause trouble. When pronouns come up in conversation (and they do) I usually recall a story that Lesley Anne Down told in the early 1980s on the TV show “Clapperboard”.… Continue reading Word of the week: pronoun
We could do with a new Hoover (sorry, vacuum cleaner). The one that we have doesn’t work very well. It doesn’t pick up much fluff, dirt or dust when used in the conventional way, at an angle to the floor, pushed back and forth across the carpet, like the one in this old Shake &… Continue reading Things that don’t work very well
Back in January I wrote a couple of pieces under the heading of “Technology Sucks” (you can read the first one here, and the follow-up is here). Maybe, to avoid tempting fate, they should have been titled “Sometimes Technology Sucks”, or “Technology Woes”, like this piece. At the start of the year we were counting… Continue reading Technology Woes
During the last month I have had conversations with three different people (people I had never met before) during which the subject turned to music in the 1980s. I told the same stories three different times, which is the kind of thing that prompts me to draft a piece for this Blog. If a story… Continue reading The Smiths and The Cure
A few years ago one of my favourite cousins in Ireland had an operation to remove a “congenital wart”. We joked about how bad that sounded but we knew that it wasn’t. “Congenital” means, simply, that she was born with it. It doesn’t mean that it was big, painful or dangerous, just that she had… Continue reading Word of the week: congenital
2016 has brought us news of so many deaths, the deaths of so many famous and talented people whose work we have enjoyed for so long. Yesterday brought the saddest news of all: Caroline Aherne has died aged 52. This will be the shortest piece on this Blog and it can only echo David Baddiel’s… Continue reading Caroline Aherne RIP
