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
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
Yesterday evening, for the first time in over a decade, I played a game of football with people my own age. I have been talking for years about getting involved but always made my excuses, and of course for much of the last 20 months the pitches have been closed. In September my son and I watched… Continue reading Back amongst the goals
Last year, in this piece about the word “Journal”, I wrote about a Reunion Lunch at my old school, the first such event that I have attended. Of the seven people in my year who were there, five of us are connected through Facebook. I assume that the other two do not have Facebook accounts, like many other people… Continue reading A thousand stories I can’t tell you right now
I use the word “disproportionately” a lot, or so it seems to me. A search for the word on this Blog shows that it has only appeared in 10 of the 1,000+ posts published so far, a disproportionately small percentage: 99.9% of the posts do not contain it at all, and this is the first… Continue reading Word of the week: disproportionately
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
When our corner of West London is mentioned in the news on TV it is often described as a “leafy suburb”. This time of year, that leafiness is very much in evidence. The local streets are covered with the leaves falling from two specific types of tree: London plane, and lime trees. My knowledge of… Continue reading Autumn Leaves
The phrase “panic buying” has been back in the news in recent weeks. During the first lockdown, in the spring of 2020, the phrase was used often to describe the amount of toilet roll people were buying. Supermarket shelves across the globe were emptied of the stuff. Eventually some of the shops here in the… Continue reading Panic Buying
ULEZ is an acronym that has been in use for a while here in London. It stands for Ultra Low Emission Zone and dictates the cost of driving through various parts of the city. Currently it applies to vehicles in the Congestion Charge zone, which covers the West End, the City of London and a… Continue reading Word of the week: ULEZ
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
The Compartments 