My son has a dose of the shingles. I’m not sure how he got it. It’s not the kind of thing that normally affects someone of his age (he’ll be 17 next week). So far nobody else in the family has caught it. I have had shingles twice in my life, once in my 20s… Continue reading Word of the week: shingles
I continue to read very little. At the start of the year, I wrote this piece about “Reader’s Block”, prompted by Nigella Lawson using the phrase in a feature called “Books That Made Me”. I have read the odd book since January but am mostly out of the habit. My 14-year-old daughter has been making… Continue reading “The piccalilli was the lurid colour of jaundice”
Here’s a set of phrases I use often: “My work is done”, “Your work is done”, “His work is done”, and so on. As you can see, it involves any possessive pronoun followed by the words “work is done”. I use it to describe the conclusion of mundane tasks (watching a TV programme, finishing a… Continue reading Word of the week: Confirmation
In the late 1970s my mother made a household change that affected all five of us (my father and her; my brother and sister and me: the three of us were teenagers at the time). She replaced our traditional bedding of sheets and blankets with duvets and duvet covers. Although this switch was made during the summer, I caught a cold within a week of sleeping… Continue reading In praise of duvet covers
I have had the same phone number all my life. It reflects the fact that I still have the same dialling code, and the same postcode, that I had when I was growing up. We rarely use this number (our landline as it is now called) and we get very few calls on it. One evening last month the phone (the… Continue reading A Telephone Tie-break
Even at the best of times, we are not great travellers. My wife and I have taken our two children on holiday most years since 2010, as far as Ireland, Spain, France and Italy. My wife travelled to Israel in 2017 to visit members of her family. I took my son to Spain at the… Continue reading Swimming in the River Thames
The Tokyo Olympics finished yesterday. We had got used to the Olympic Breakfast programme every morning on BBC1, catching up on the overnight action, and we’ll miss it. The show usually involved news of gold medals for Team GB, right up to yesterday morning when Jason Kenny (Keirin, cycling) and Lauren Price (boxing) completed the medal tally to leave GB fourth… Continue reading Word of the week: Sayonara
Ever since my family acquired a radio-cassette recorder in the mid-1970s I have been in the habit of recording radio shows. I acquired a VCR in the mid-1980s and since then I have also recorded thousands of hours of TV programmes. I have spent too much of my time doing this, and have recorded too… Continue reading The man who recorded too much
Last month, sorting through a large plastic storage box full of cards, invitations, old paperwork and newspapers from significant dates, I found this: It’s a notebook dating back to 1947 containing my father’s handwritten records of his athletics achievements: distances and times in the events he competed in at various meetings all over Ireland. He… Continue reading My family’s 74-year span of athletics times
It took nearly four years, but last month I finally tasted my first negroni, the cocktail that featured in the Weekend magazine in Saturday’s edition of The Guardian. It was described as “a serious drink for serious times … the cocktail for 2021”. For connoisseurs, it was probably the cocktail for several years ago. My brother was telling me about… Continue reading Word of the week: negroni
The Compartments 