My subject is memory. Occasionally names or concepts fail to come to mind when I want them to. Sometimes I have struggled to remember the names of actresses, like the one who played Bubble in “Absolutely Fabulous” and the woman who played Cassie in the original UK series of “House of Cards”. Similarly, about five… Continue reading Word of the week: Spiegelhalter
As noted in this earlier piece, I have finally acquired a pair of reading glasses, after years of compensating for my gradually deteriorating eyesight with the aid of magnifying glasses. It has not prompted a reading binge, but it has made it easier to do the puzzles in the weekend paper, as I expected. An… Continue reading Digging out my old music books
I have finally acquired a pair of reading glasses. I should probably have got them at least a decade ago. I have been using magnifying glasses since 2008. I bought them initially for the only things that I had difficulty reading: “sell by” and “best before” dates on food packets. I always kept at least… Continue reading Reading glasses
It’s been a long time since I read a book like Timothy Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Work Week”. I read it during a reading binge that lasted for most of 2011. Checking through this Blog I see that I have never referred to it here (over 1,000 posts, over one million words) or an idea from… Continue reading Letting small bad things happen
2 November is the Feast of All Souls. Britannica.com offers us this: All Souls’ Day, in Roman Catholicism, a day for commemoration of all the faithful departed, those baptized Christians who are believed to be in purgatory because they died with the guilt of lesser sins on their souls … Roman Catholic doctrine holds that… Continue reading A Reading for All Souls
I do not read as much as I would like to, and I see far fewer movies than I used to. As noted before on these pages, many times, I try to keep up-to-date with two sets of award-winners from the worlds of books and movies: Booker Prizes and Academy Awards (or Oscars). I regard… Continue reading … and up-to-date with Booker winners again
When I was growing up, we had a medium-sized bookcase filled with children’s books but only a handful of novels aimed at adults. Most of the books we had were published by Ladybird or Puffin. I even managed to read a few of them: “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and the other six… Continue reading “John Paul Sarter, the famous French extensionist …”
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 the first part of my favourite joke from recent years: “Why did the vegan cross the road?” I was asked this by a very polite, well-brought up woman in her 30s, who I have known since she was 3. Immediately after asking me the question she looked worried and said, “Oh, you’re not a vegan are you?”, as… Continue reading Vegans and Oxbridge Graduates
During the last quarter of 2019 and the first half of 2020 I was on something of a reading binge. I realized long ago that I am not the kind of person who always has a book on the go, the kind of person who fits a regular amount of reading into most days, weeks or months. I can go months… Continue reading Reader’s Block
The Compartments 