My son has a dose of the shingles. I’m not sure how he got it. It’s not the kind of thing that normally affects someone of his age (he’ll be 17 next week). So far nobody else in the family has caught it. I have had shingles twice in my life, once in my 20s… Continue reading Word of the week: shingles
Here’s another news story that passed me by in 2019: the capital city of African nation Burundi has changed. It is now Gitega, which was the seat of the Kingdom of Burundi until it was abolished in 1966. The former capital, Bujumbura, is still the economic capital and centre of commerce. Like many other facts… Continue reading Word of the week: Gitega
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
Our local minicab office has had a refurb. It had lain empty for a year or two but now the single-storey pair of rooms attached to a nearby house has been done up. It doesn’t appear to be open yet, but I hope it will be soon. At the start of 2016 I wrote this piece predicting that I would not be signing up for the ride-hailing… Continue reading Word of the week: statioons
Rabona is a word I have been meaning to write about for several months. I had never heard it before March 2021, but it has entered into the vocabulary of football-watchers, taking its place with Panenka. I could try and describe both techniques, but will use a couple of Wikipedia entries instead. As you can read here, “the Rabona is the technique of kicking the football where the kicking leg is crossed behind the… Continue reading Word of the week: Rabona
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 World of the week: Dazzle
The Tokyo Olympics finished yesterday. We had got used to the Olympic Breakfast programme every morning on BBC1, catching up on the overnight action, and we’ll miss it. The show usually involved news of gold medals for Team GB, right up to yesterday morning when Jason Kenny (Keirin, cycling) and Lauren Price (boxing) completed the medal tally to leave GB fourth… Continue reading Word of the week: Sayonara
It took nearly four years, but last month I finally tasted my first negroni, the cocktail that featured in the Weekend magazine in Saturday’s edition of The Guardian. It was described as “a serious drink for serious times … the cocktail for 2021”. For connoisseurs, it was probably the cocktail for several years ago. My brother was telling me about… Continue reading Word of the week: negroni
This piece is about the 4-letter word that begins with “C” and rhymes with “hunt”. In the thousand or so pieces published so far on this Blog I have referred to this word a few times but never spelt it out, and will not do so here. Over the last ten days I have watched… Continue reading Word of the week: The C Word
These “Word of the week” pieces have become rather less frequent in recent months, for no particular reason. I have drafted several posts without finalizing them, but there are still over 170 finished pieces (and over 100,000 words of text) dotted throughout this site about words that have been in the news or come to… Continue reading Word of the week: crucify
The Compartments 