Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of the season of Lent. It falls earlier this year than most. The New Moon began this week, taking us into the Chinese Year of the Monkey. Happy New Year to you. As it coincides with the start of Lent this (Chinese) New Year might be a better time… Continue reading Things to do in Lent
Last month I received a Questionnaire, an NHS GP Survey, through the post. I dislike Questionnaires very, very much and rarely fill them in, but decided to fill in this one. It struck me that it was worded to make it difficult to say, simply, “I am very happy with my GP and have no… Continue reading Questionnaires
You know Jenga, the game where you build a tower out of wooden blocks and then try to remove one block at a time until the whole tower collapses. The word means “build” in Swahili, as I learnt last year from this article featuring the inventor Leslie Scott and Alan Hassenfeld from Hasbro. I assumed… Continue reading Word of the week: Jenga
I like New Zealanders. I have met many of them over the last 40 years and can’t recall any that I didn’t like. Friends from work and school have landed up in New Zealand and are living good lives, from what I can see. I have spent many hours in conversation with Kiwis but still… Continue reading Kiwi pronunciation: pigs and pegs, badges and barges
The picture below shows a selection of my pocket diaries going back to the 1970s. There’s an unbroken run going from 1979 to 2001, available any time if I want to check the dates of holidays, meetings, gigs, exams, Film Festivals, and very occasionally how I was feeling about things. I saw Lou Reed at… Continue reading Diaries: old, new and in between
Many years ago a family friend, still in her 20s at the time, was bemoaning the behaviour of younger people and said, “Robbie Williams is so right: youth is wasted on the young”. I wasn’t aware that Robbie Williams had said it, or sung it, but had heard the quote. I thought that Oscar Wilde… Continue reading Quotes: The wisdom of Robbie Williams, or is it Oscar Wilde?
In previous pieces I have mentioned Universal Knowledge, with the understanding that there isn’t much of it, and that some people’s idea of what is universally known is very different from other people’s ideas. Porlock, Battleship Potemkin, Cargo Cult: I never assume that these terms are familiar to friends and family. And the same goes… Continue reading Usually I’m Anthony Trollope, but not this week
If I had been writing this Blog a year ago I would have written about the closure of the old 12 Bar Club in Denmark Street, in January 2015. I said my farewells the month before that in typical fashion: a drunken Saturday night watching punk-themed bands. The headliners were Banjoey Ramone, Ramones songs played… Continue reading Farewell to the 12 Bar Club, again
Yesterday morning, just after 7am, I finished reading “The Tempest”, Shakespeare’s last play. These days I get up early if I can. If I get to bed before 10.30pm (which was unthinkable until about five years ago) I generally get up before 6am the next day. If I could control my sleep cycle (which would… Continue reading On reading every Shakespeare play
I would like to have a Kindle (or other eReader) with all the books that I have ever read, for search purposes. Then I could search through the entire collection and know that I’ll find the reference I’m looking for. This option, to search through my entire collection, is available on my Kindle 1.0 (with… Continue reading Looking for things in books, and not quite remembering
The Compartments 