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
At this time of year my son suffers badly from hay fever. In the early spring there’s something in the air in our part of London that plays havoc with his eyes and nose. It started 11 years ago, when he was four. He left nursery one day with his eyes all swollen and red… Continue reading Word of the week: Loratadine
We are back from our holiday in Spain, well looked after throughout our stay by my brother, who has lived there for most of his adult life. In fact, he has lived there for well over half of his entire life. It is nearly 36 years since he left London to set up home there.… Continue reading Word of the week: sunburn
WARNING: There are three photos at the end of this piece that show the effects of insect bites on my skin this summer, and an infection that affected my palms some years ago. You might find them rather unpleasant but they illustrate what this piece is about. If you are squeamish about such things, be… Continue reading Holiday notes: sun, sea, sand, and insect bites
The EHIC, or “European Health Insurance Card”, entitles those of us who live in the UK to “reduced cost (or sometimes free) state-provided healthcare where treatment becomes medically necessary during a temporary visit to other countries of the European Economic Area or Switzerland”. I quote directly from the letter that accompanied our new cards when… Continue reading Word of the week: EHIC
What are your strengths? What are you good at? What do your friends, family, and others around you, regard as your strengths? In my case, friends and family have often made reference to my memory. I’m not sure that they all regard it as a strength, but it’s certainly something that gets mentioned. On numerous… Continue reading No good at medical chat
I have a touch of writer’s cramp. I have just typed that sentence, and am typing this one too, because the Speech Recognition feature of Windows 10 has interpreted the phrase “I have writer’s cramp” in the following ways: I have written square Only when writer’s cramp I can wreck it’s a I her writings… Continue reading Writer’s Cramp, and more about Voice Recognition
At the start of the month, in this piece, I wrote about taking out a monthly subscription to a nearby gym, a fitness centre attached to a publicly-run swimming pool. It costs less than a quarter of what I was paying to a privately-run gym earlier in this decade. One reason for joining the private… Continue reading Swimming, and New York City cab drivers
Here’s a phrase that I heard for the first time last month: “Summer bodies are made in spring”. I caught just a minute or two of Zoe Ball’s Breakfast Show on Radio 2 one morning and that seemed to be the lesson of the day. There might have been a more detailed chat with someone… Continue reading “Summer bodies are made in spring”
Just like emirp and plangonologist, here’s another word that hasn’t made it into the Oxford English Dictionary yet: plogging. A note from my son’s school tells me that this week he will be taking part in his first plogging session, during PE, and explains: “Plogging is a combination of jogging with picking up litter (Swedish:… Continue reading Word of the week: plogging
