SPOILER ALERT: This article reveals the winner of the 2015-16 series of “University Challenge” (the final was broadcast on Monday 18 April 2016). If you don’t want to know who won, stop reading now. The show will be on the BBC iPlayer until around 18 May, so you can watch it here.
Poof: I think that’s how it’s spelt, though it might be puff. It’s a word people used in the 1970s to describe a homosexual, along with its 2-syllable alternative “poofter”. People used it in a similar way to how we use the word “wuss” these days. A kid doesn’t want to dive off the low… Continue reading Word of the Week: poof
There is no hierarchy of misery. Bad things happen. There is no linear relationship between the things that happen to people and how they cope with them. The worst thing that ever happened to you is the worst thing that ever happened to you. Losing a parent in your 30s or 40s can affect you… Continue reading The hierarchy of misery
Ten years ago I set up a wormery in the garden. Back then there were newspaper articles every few months advising us on how easy it was. You didn’t even need a garden. One journalist set up their wormery on the balcony of their flat, another kept one indoors. The principle is simple: a plastic… Continue reading Wormeries
Last month (March’s “Coincidence Corner”) I quoted something from Andy Miller’s “The Year of Reading Dangerously (How Fifty Books Saved My Life)”, his wife’s advice on how to read “Middlemarch”: “Just do what I did. Read fifty pages a day and leave it at that.” Since quoting those words I haven’t even found time to… Continue reading So much for fifty pages a day
Don’t tell me what you’re going to do, just do it. Afterwards tell me what you did, and if there’s time tell me how you did it. Over the years, most people who have told me that they are writing a book, or have “just started” a book, or are going to write a book… Continue reading Don’t tell me what you’re going to do
In the late 1990s I delivered several months’ worth of training sessions to civil servants, training sessions that combined computer use with tips about publishing and printing. The delegates were about to start using their computers in a way that would save time and money in a clearly quantifiable way. This doesn’t happen with every… Continue reading Hyphens, En Dashes and Em Dashes
This has been a family catchphrase since the 1980s. It is, of course, factually incorrect. You do not drive better when you have had a few drinks. The driving instructor who taught my brother to drive in the late 1970s was unavailable to teach me to drive in the mid-1980s. He had lost his licence… Continue reading “I drive better when I’ve had a few drinks”
Is music a spandrel? This is a question I have discussed with many people over the years, usually beginning with a definition of the word spandrel. The term comes from architecture and has been borrowed to describe the by-product of an evolutionary adaptation, like flight in birds. Feathers evolved to keep birds warm, but they… Continue reading Word of the week: spandrel
Yesterday was the anniversary of my mother’s death. She died nineteen years ago. I was holding her hand as the breath left her body. Every year we commemorate the anniversary in the same way, a mass said for her intention, and a day spent doing very little. Once or twice I have gone back to… Continue reading An Anniversary Day
The Compartments 