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
How are your teeth? From my experience, the range of answers to this question is directly linked to age. People of my generation (born in the 1960s, give or take a few years) are likely to still have most or all of their own teeth, but with some combination of fillings or crowns, maybe even… Continue reading Our first appointment for 2019
This is a mostly biographical piece about fluctuations in body weight. It was prompted by something the actor-comedian Greg Davies said when he was a guest on the Chris Evans breakfast show on BBC Radio 2 one Friday last July. As I noted in this piece, those Friday morning Chris Evans shows have an entirely… Continue reading “Never heavier”; reflections on body weight
At some point in the last 40 years the Casualty departments in UK hospitals were renamed as Accident and Emergency (or A&E). In the US A&E is known as ER (the Emergency Room). “Casualty” is a BBC1 series set in a hospital, broadcast on Saturday nights after “Strictly Come Dancing”. I have never seen a… Continue reading Urgent Care
I have injured my left hand. Nothing serious, no broken bones, just some “soft tissue trauma”, in medical parlance. It means that I am resting it as much as possible, wearing a splint for the first time, and typing these words one-handed. Usually I touch-type, both hands resting on the home keys, and don’t even… Continue reading Typing one-handed
