Last year I had a realization regarding conversational recall, and wrote about it in this piece (June 2019): I am no good at medical chat. Or, more accurately, I do not retain information about other people’s ailments, diagnoses and medications. This would be a problem if I were in the medical business, but I am… Continue reading Word of the week: BRAN
Bank Holiday Monday here in the UK, and this week ITV are showing repeats of their quiz show “Tenable” that were first broadcast late in 2016, Series 1 Episodes 6-10. Here are the questions and answers in the same format as in other pieces on this Blog, such as this one from March 2019: a… Continue reading “Tenable” repeats 25 May 2020 onwards (Series 1 Episodes 6-10)
Last month, over the Easter weekend, I finished re-reading “Ulysses”, James Joyce’s “illiterate, underbred book” in the words of Virginia Woolf. Or, if you prefer, “the most important expression which the present age has found … a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape” according to TS… Continue reading On re-reading “Ulysses”
How is your visual acuity? See if you can spot the differences between the two bottles of Guinness Export pictured below. I have mentioned Guinness Export on this Blog more than once in recent weeks. It has again become a drink of choice, after a gap of some years. The name on the label is,… Continue reading Spot the difference: Guinness Export
Coronavirus will probably turn out to be the “Word of the Year” for 2020, not just here in the UK but worldwide. It may well become the Word of the Decade. The word Corona on its own has two meanings for me, both recalling the 1970s. First of all, Corona was a soft drinks brand.… Continue reading Word of the week: Corona
Here in the UK, we have been living in lockdown for nearly seven weeks. There is no live sport on TV. The BBC and ITV are raiding their archives. We have had snooker classics on BBC, and ITV are about to show the entire Euro 96 tournament (football) on one channel or another. Yesterday the… Continue reading “The world’s a big place”
My choices for “Album of the week” have become rather irregular. For six weeks in a row I managed to pick a different album each week, listen to it far more than I usually listen to a single disk, and then Blog about it. The reasons for starting the sequence were explained in this piece… Continue reading Album of the week: #9 “Sunrise” (Elvis Presley)
When did you first use a cashpoint? When did you first insert a bank card into an ATM (“hole in the wall”) and withdraw cash? For me it was some time in 1983, when I was a student. It involved using my new NatWest Servicecard, which was separate from my cheque guarantee card. Before that,… Continue reading Two things that we didn’t do in April 2020
Here, for the ninth month in a row on this Blog, and for what it’s worth, is a screenshot taken from the BBC website showing Leeds United top of the Championship, the second tier of English football. I say “for what it’s worth” because it’s the same screenshot that was used in this piece from… Continue reading “Leeds Boy”
In search of family viewing, and after a false start, we watch “Breaking Away” (the 1979 film directed by Peter Yates) in memory of my father. Last week’s ITV drama “Quiz” was a real treat. It was based on events related to the quiz show “Who wants to be a millionaire?” nearly 20 years ago… Continue reading “Breaking Away” and “feel-good” movies
The Compartments 