I have had the same phone number all my life. It reflects the fact that I still have the same dialling code, and the same postcode, that I had when I was growing up. We rarely use this number (our landline as it is now called) and we get very few calls on it. One evening last month the phone (the… Continue reading A Telephone Tie-break
Ever since my family acquired a radio-cassette recorder in the mid-1970s I have been in the habit of recording radio shows. I acquired a VCR in the mid-1980s and since then I have also recorded thousands of hours of TV programmes. I have spent too much of my time doing this, and have recorded too… Continue reading The man who recorded too much
“Word Perfect” is a book by Susie Dent published recently here in the UK. Unfortunately the initial print-run was based on an early version of the text and was full of typographical errors. As you can read in this piece from the Guardian (“Susie Dent ‘gutted’ after new book Word Perfect printed with host of… Continue reading Word of the week: WordPerfect
Have you noticed how frequently characters in films and on TV open and close their laptops? Often, if someone is working away and is interrupted by another character, however briefly, they simply close up their computer. They don’t save their work, they don’t have to deal with any prompts onscreen, they simply flip the screen… Continue reading Flipping laptops
Here’s a picture of my Sony MiniDisc Walkman which has just celebrated its 22nd birthday. As you can see, it’s an MZ-R30, and it still works perfectly. So do the hundreds of discs that I have bought for it over the years, examples of which appear in the following picture. The original charger continues to… Continue reading Word of the week: MiniDisc
Earlier this month I wrote this piece about The Elephant Parade, an event that took place exactly 10 years ago here in London. Streets, parks, squares and indoor spaces were populated by life-size models of baby elephants, painted by a variety of artists. It captured our imagination, and I took photographs of all 250+ elephants.… Continue reading More Elephant Pictures, and reflections on photo albums
Last week’s Album of the week was “The Wheat Album” by The Rutles. It prompted memories of “The White Album”, as the Beatles’ self-titled 1968 release is usually called. I planned to make Jay-Z’s similarly-named 2003 release “The Black Album” my latest Album of the week, having bought a copy from a local charity shop… Continue reading Album of the week: #6 “Shadows in the Night” (Bob Dylan), not “The Black Album” (Jay-Z)
As mentioned in this piece last week I have decided to follow the example of the new Master of Jesus College Cambridge and select an Album of the Week. I started with “Pin-Ups” by David Bowie and have followed it with “entertainment!” by Gang of Four. It was their first album, released on EMI here… Continue reading Album of the week: #2 “entertainment!” (Gang of Four)
Every now and then on this Blog I reflect on subscriptions, most recently in this piece about Netflix (June 2019). As predicted, at the end of our free trial month we continued to subscribe to the service, and still do. Unlike some of the services that I have subscribed to, for month after month without… Continue reading Word of the week: Prime
Reflections on hiring bikes in West London; there are over 1,500 words in this piece. These days the streets and pavements of London are awash with hire bikes. It began at some point earlier this century with the arrival of docking stations placed throughout the centre of town, home to extremely robust (and surprisingly heavy)… Continue reading Word of the week: Mobike
The Compartments 