Robert FitzRoy (1805-1865) was a naval officer, captain of HMS Beagle for Darwin’s voyage to the southern hemisphere, and later an MP. He was also Governor of New Zealand and, later still, the “founding director of the Meteorological Office – the world’s first full-time professional weather forecaster”. That quote comes from the fly-leaf of my… Continue reading Word of the week: FitzRoy
How visual are you? Can you picture things in the correct order, like colours of the rainbow, or Olympic rings? If so, congratulations. The rest of us have to make do with mnemonics and acronyms for this sort of information. For colours of the rainbow, I have always favoured the simple 7-letter word ROYGBIV (Red… Continue reading Word of the week: BRYBGR
Another week another quiz show. Last Friday Channel 4 launched “One Question” hosted by Claudia Winkelman. As its name suggests, this is a show in which contestants can win money (in this case up to 100,000 pounds) if they know, or guess, the answer to just one question. In total there were two questions on… Continue reading Word of the week: rumbledethumps
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
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 weekday mornings I spend a few minutes checking out Breakfast TV. I try to catch the local weather on BBC Breakfast, typically in the bulletin just before 7.30am. On ITV I mainly check in just to see who’s accompanying Susannah Reid on “Good Morning Britain”. Since Piers Morgan left the show there has been a succession of… Continue reading Word of the week: Alphablocks
So, here are two things I have learnt over the last week. First, TV presenter Richard Madeley does not like it when people start sentences with the word “So”. It was a featured item on Jeremy Vine’s show on BBC Radio 2 last week. As you may know, the show runs from 12 noon until 2pm Monday… Continue reading So, Jeremy Clarkson has never heard of “Tenable”
We continue to subscribe to Netflix, nearly two years after I agreed to my daughter’s request that we sign up for the “free” 30 day trial. I learnt recently that I could reduce my monthly fee down a bit. We are still paying extra so that we can run it on up to four devices.… Continue reading Word of the week: Dazzle
“I want to be a tomato.” Does this phrase mean anything to you? If not, how about saying it with the voice of a child, sounding really miserable, about to burst into tears? If it rings any bells, then you probably remember an advert for Prudential financial services from the late 1980s. I have been… Continue reading “I want to be a tomato”
Back in 2017, in this piece, I wrote about “Countdown”, the game show that was the first programme broadcast when Channel 4 launched in 1982. It continues to be aired most weekdays at 2.10pm, with repeats at 6am. The show has been in the news recently because it has a new host, Anne Robinson. She took over from Nick Hewer in the episode broadcast… Continue reading “Countdown” July 2021
The Compartments 