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
Many phrases have entered common usage since Coronavirus began to dominate the headlines back in March: “social distancing”, “track and trace”, “immuno-compromised”. A phrase that has been around for many years but has only registered with me in the last few months, when reading articles about Coronavirus, is the “thousand-yard stare”. I first encountered it… Continue reading “Thousand-yard stares”
The Compartments 