Happy New Year to you. May 2024 be a better year for you than 2023 was. During the last two festive seasons my son and I both had Covid in the days after Christmas, as you can read in this piece from 2022 and this one from 2021. We have escaped it this time round.… Continue reading A Covid-Free Start to 2024
My daughter turned 17 earlier this month. In the days leading up to the big day I told her about how I spent my 17th birthday, or more specifically the evening of that day. I don’t recall much about the morning or afternoon, a regular Friday at school at the start of my second year… Continue reading What I did on my 17th birthday
There are some news stories that clearly made a big impression on people. When I was growing up we would only have leaf tea, brewed up in a pot. Right up until the 1980s we never used teabags. My father always said that the stuff that they put in teabags was only the sweepings from… Continue reading The sweepings from the factory floor
I return to the subject of favourite lines from the movies, and am surprised to find that I have not written about this for over two years. The most recent piece, “Get this boy a bib”, was about “Westworld” (the original 1973 release). Last night my children and I watched “Groundhog Day” again. It’s a… Continue reading “Sometimes people just die”
The word “nosebleed” has not appeared on this Blog until now. I find the Search option on this site very useful. Sometimes I am about to draft something that has been playing on my mind and find that I have already drafted and posted it, maybe years earlier. But there’s been nothing so far about… Continue reading Nosebleeds
The school year here in the UK runs from 1 September to 31 August. If you have a child born on the first of these dates they will be the oldest in their class. Any child born on the last of these dates will be the youngest in their class. There might still be some… Continue reading Daily reminders of being 15, 16, 17, 18
Every now then, on these pages, I reflect on the fortunes of Leeds United FC, the club that I have supported since childhood. This season is not going well. At the start of the club’s most recent fixture Leeds sat in the relegation zone, 19th in the table, one place above Southampton at the bottom.… Continue reading A weekend not worrying about football
Every piece on this Blog is drafted in a document that also contains hundreds of thousands of words that will never be made available for anyone else to read. Every year I start a new one of these documents, with the word “Snippets” and the year somewhere in the filename. These words are being typed… Continue reading Word of the week: gamechanger
Take a look at these two beauties, a pair of rotary telephones that we had stored away for many years. They were out of sight but have recently been brought back into the open. The one on the right is the phone that we used throughout my childhood. I don’t remember any earlier ones, so… Continue reading Rotary Telephones
To some extent this Blog acts like a diary. It’s not a diary that’s updated every day, but the date of each post is relevant. Sometimes I “back-fill” pieces days, or even months, after the event. I am doing it now, posting this piece for Christmas Day 2022 several weeks into 2023. I do the… Continue reading Here we go again (Covid Round 2), and diaries
The Compartments 