Most of the time this Blog does not deal with the leading stories of the day. You have many thousands of other places to read about them. For the last 19 days there has only been one significant news story in Europe: the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There, I’ve said it. If I were living… Continue reading Word of the week: Kyiv
As I explained in this piece (“Bar snack? (9) …”), I rarely do Cryptic Crosswords these days. I do, however, attempt the Quick Crossword whenever I pick up a copy of the Guardian. As I noted here, it is my paper of choice, and you can get it for free at Waitrose if you have… Continue reading Word of the week: onager
Picture, if you will, someone writing hundreds of words which omit one specific letter. The missing letter is one of the five vowels, so the writer must choose his or her words with extreme precision. It is difficult enough to do this for five sentences, but whole books exist which use this device from beginning… Continue reading Word of the week: lipogram
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
I use the word “disproportionately” a lot, or so it seems to me. A search for the word on this Blog shows that it has only appeared in 10 of the 1,000+ posts published so far, a disproportionately small percentage: 99.9% of the posts do not contain it at all, and this is the first… Continue reading Word of the week: disproportionately
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
The Compartments 