Just over a year ago I wrote this piece, “33 months of 5-a-side”, reporting that I had continued to play football at least once a month for nearly three years. For a while, in the spring of 2022, I was playing twice a week. By last summer I was only playing once a month. As… Continue reading Word of the week: Symbolic
Earlier this summer, for many reasons, I cancelled my subscriptions to all the sports channels. The most important of these many reasons was time: I didn’t want to spend untold hours watching live cricket in daylight hours or baseball late into the night just because I could. Our main justification for subscribing to sports channels… Continue reading Sports Channels and Smoking, an Analogy
My children are now past the age when they might need Fake IDs to get served in bars. I wrote about their first experiences of buying alcoholic drinks in this piece last month. Two years ago, when he turned 18, my son bought me a pint of London Pride on his birthday. In October my… Continue reading Fake IDs
My daughter turned 18 last month. I mentioned it in this piece about Berlin. When my son turned 18 two years ago we took a symbolic trip to a nearby pub for him to buy a pint of beer for the first time. It was a pint of London Pride, for me. He had lemonade.… Continue reading Buying your dad a pint for the first time
My daughter returned last night from a school trip to Berlin. A week earlier she celebrated her 18th birthday. She was only away for three nights, but it felt like longer. She had a cold the weekend before she left, and I have had one for the last few days, but had recovered enough to… Continue reading Berlin Memories
As noted in this earlier piece, I have finally acquired a pair of reading glasses, after years of compensating for my gradually deteriorating eyesight with the aid of magnifying glasses. It has not prompted a reading binge, but it has made it easier to do the puzzles in the weekend paper, as I expected. An… Continue reading Digging out my old music books
I have finally acquired a pair of reading glasses. I should probably have got them at least a decade ago. I have been using magnifying glasses since 2008. I bought them initially for the only things that I had difficulty reading: “sell by” and “best before” dates on food packets. I always kept at least… Continue reading Reading glasses
I am in a Sam Cooke frame of mind, singing and playing a range of his songs that I have learnt over the last 25 years. Some of them reached #1 in various countries. He only had one UK #1, as a songwriter: “Only 16”, recorded by Craig Douglas (1959). He wrote and recorded “You… Continue reading “Touch the Hem of His Garment”
How are your sleep patterns? Perfect, disastrous, or somewhere in between? Mine are somewhere between those two extremes, nearer to “perfect” than “disastrous”. I expect that’s true for most people. The following 1,360 words are about sleep, leading to a memory about the best hour’s sleep that I have ever had. I’m afraid that the… Continue reading The best hour’s sleep I ever had
Back in 2019 I noted, in this piece, that I am not much good at medical chat. My memory is fine when it comes to things like biographical detail and conversation recall but medical information rarely stays in my mind for long. It might be a good thing. As that earlier piece noted: “Maybe it’s… Continue reading Word of the week: Hyperplasia
The Compartments 