As you may know, McCarthy is one of the more numerous Irish surnames. According to this page on the Irish Genealogy website, detailing the 20 most common surnames in Ireland from an 1890 study, it was 13th on the list. There have been plenty of prominent McCarthy’s in living memory, including Mick (past and current… Continue reading Word of the week: McCarthy
Three times in recent weeks BBC Radio 2 (my radio station of choice) has played “Mama used to say”, a 1982 release by Junior. It reached #7 in the UK charts and #30 in the Billboard Hot 100. Every time I hear the record, including these three recent plays, I recall the same scene. It… Continue reading “Mama used to say”, a musical memory
Here’s my monthly screenshot of the top of the Championship table, the second tier of English football. Like all the others (most recently in this piece) it was grabbed from the BBC website. Like most screenshots included on this Blog since last December, it shows Leeds United, the team that I have supported since childhood,… Continue reading Concentrating on just one game, for a change
Early in 2016, I wrote this piece about words and phrases that seem to crop up regularly in prize-winning fiction. One of them was antimacassar, “a piece of cloth put over the back of a chair to protect it from grease or hair-oil – macassar was used as a hair oil in Victorian and Edwardian… Continue reading Word of the week: antimacassar
A few months ago I wrote, in this piece, about readers in places like Nepal, Palau and the Falkland Islands, thousands of miles from West London where these words are being drafted. I noted that more than half of the countries in the world appear in the basic statistical information provided by WordPress about Visitors… Continue reading More about readers in distant places, and population
Starting on Wednesday 18 September 2019, ITV have been showing repeats of episodes from the first series of their quiz show “Tenable”, first broadcast in November 2016. Here are the questions from the first few episodes, in the same format as in other pieces on this Blog, such as this one from March 2019: a… Continue reading “Tenable” questions, series 1
Back in 2016, in this piece, I wrote about reading every Booker Prize winner. I had just finished Marlon James’s “A Brief History of Seven Killings”, which won in 2015. Until last month I had not read any of the books that won in the following three years. As of yesterday evening I am up-to-date… Continue reading On reading every Booker Prize winner, revisited
Happy birthday to me, and to all the people I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post from exactly two years ago. This year I am breaking my birthday rule, the one that states that you should have a party whenever the day falls on a Saturday. I thought about it but couldn’t be… Continue reading Breaking my birthday rule
If you have spent any time here in London you will probably be familiar with blue plaques, like this one: You will find them on buildings connected with people and organizations of note. The example above is on a row of houses close to Barnes Bridge on the south side of the river. It’s very… Continue reading Blue plaques, and a life that spanned three centuries
If you have any quiz books that were printed in the first decade of this century, they may well contain questions that are no longer valid, answers that are no longer correct, or answers that used to be unique but no longer are. This piece looks at 12 examples of such questions and answers, and… Continue reading 12 quiz questions that need updating
The Compartments 