Calabobos: it’s a Spanish word for a specific type of rain, rain that seems light, like drizzle, but will soak you. My brother told me the word over 20 years ago and I have never been able to remember it. He said that it equates with the phrase “fool soaker”. If you’re foolish enough to… Continue reading Word of the week: calabobos
We usually leave it late to buy our Christmas tree. For the second year running we did it on the Saturday before Christmas (23 December last year, 22 December this year), £15 for a healthy-looking 7-foot fir, or spruce, or whatever it is. I expected to pay more, but that’s all it was. One year,… Continue reading Supply and Demand, and Christmas Trees
A few little observations about English football, specifically about goal difference. Look away now if that’s not your kind of thing. This season I am spending even more time than usual studying football league tables, the Championship table in particular. Right now it shows my team, Leeds United, at the top, ahead of Norwich City… Continue reading Goal difference
Sometimes you hear two or three songs in succession that include the same word, not an obvious one like “love” or “baby”, but something unexpected. The first four songs in an episode of “Top of the Pops” shown on BBC4 last weekend all featured the word “fight”. The episode first aired on 6 November 1986,… Continue reading Word of the week: fight
Yesterday, Paul Gambaccini’s “Pick of the Pops” show on BBC Radio 2 featured the charts from this week in 1971 and 1988. Can you recall the Christmas #1s from those years? The answers appear below. It’s the kind of information that people of my generation (those of us who followed the charts closely) might retain… Continue reading Christmas #1s, and biting the dust at 52
Back in September I wrote this piece about “The Clock”, Christian Marclay’s installation at Tate Modern here in London. As I noted, using words from the Tate’s website, it is “a montage of thousands of film and television images of clocks, edited together so they show the actual time. It is a thrilling journey through… Continue reading Beaten by “The Clock”
Every year my old college produces its Annual Record. As the name suggests, it’s a publication reviewing the previous twelve months of college life. The 2018 edition arrived in the post two days ago. I had been looking forward to it and couldn’t remember exactly what time of year it usually arrives. Like many items… Continue reading Annual Record
Last Sunday this Blog celebrated its third birthday. Or rather, it didn’t. As on most Sundays in recent months I didn’t draft, review or finalize anything on the day in question. Although I’m generally okay with dates and anniversaries I think of 4 December as the date this Blog was created, but it was two… Continue reading Into a fourth year
Last week, on his BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show, Chris Evans played “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand” by The Beatles, a German-language version of their 1963 #1 “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. I remember enough of my O Level German to know that the title is not a direct translation. “Komm, Gib Mir Deine… Continue reading “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand”
“The jungle programme”, as we call it, is back. “I’m a celebrity get me out of here”, to give it its proper name, is into the final week of its current series on ITV. As a family we have been paying more attention to it than in recent years, partly because many of this year’s… Continue reading Word of the week: dunny
The Compartments 