Most of the time this Blog does not deal with the leading stories of the day. You have many thousands of other places to read about them. For the last 19 days there has only been one significant news story in Europe: the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There, I’ve said it. If I were living… Continue reading Word of the week: Kyiv
As I explained in this piece (“Bar snack? (9) …”), I rarely do Cryptic Crosswords these days. I do, however, attempt the Quick Crossword whenever I pick up a copy of the Guardian. As I noted here, it is my paper of choice, and you can get it for free at Waitrose if you have… Continue reading Word of the week: onager
Buy at a low price, sell at a higher price. That, as I’m sure you know, is one way to make money. It is something that we have never set out to do, but over the last two years we have acquired many hundreds of items which we are now able to offload at twice… Continue reading Buying for 5 and selling for 10
Last month I posted two pieces about me and my son both testing positive for Covid, five days apart. We have recovered, as far as we can tell. Our symptoms were mild. Time will tell if we have lasting effects from the infection, but so far so good. Until two days ago, my wife and… Continue reading It was only a matter of time
Two days ago, on the Feast of Epiphany, I took down all the Christmas decorations before noon. I always do this. It’s a habit, or a superstition, that my mother taught me. I don’t know what would happen if I behaved differently. As with all superstitions, I don’t plan to tempt fate and find out.… Continue reading My Christmas Tree superstition
Following on from last Friday’s piece, about contracting Covid despite being triple jabbed and super-cautious, I have tested positive again this morning. It’s a whole week since I first saw what a positive test looks like, but now I am not alone. My son tested positive two days ago, on Monday morning. This means that he is on Day… Continue reading And then there were two
Well, I wasn’t expecting this. Despite having three doses of Covid vaccine in the last 9 months, and acting with great caution over the last year and more, I have tested positive for Coronavirus. Three Lateral Flow tests all revealed both red lines, something we had not seen in nearly 9 months of taking tests… Continue reading Triple-jabbed, super-cautious, positive
Over the last two weekends, as usual at this time of year, three TV shows have concluded with public votes (by phone, text and online) to determine the winning contestants: “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here”, “Strictly Come Dancing” and “Sports Personality of the Year”. For the fourth year running, ITV’s “The X Factor” was not part of… Continue reading Votes For Women
Most Tuesday evenings my wife and I run a kind of minicab service for our teenage children. Their extracurricular activities here in West London take them to places that are local but further apart than I realized until last week. Our daughter’s athletics training is at a club to the north and east of where… Continue reading The Tuesday Minicab Service
As a family we enjoy a wide range of savoury snacks. We have baskets full of, but not limited to, various flavours of crisps (“potato chips” to our American friends), pretzels of different sizes, mini-poppadums, prawn crackers, Quavers, Wotsits, mini-Cheddars and salted popcorn. My children take a packet or two of snacks to school with them… Continue reading The great Twiglet shortage of ’21
The Compartments 