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
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
The Compartments 