A week ago I teamed up with some friends and family to take part in a pub quiz for the first time this year. I wanted to catch up with the guy who hosts it, and there was also a decent jackpot on offer: £680, in cash. The prize for the winning team is a… Continue reading Word of the week: Belgrade
Back in 2019 I noted, in this piece, that I am not much good at medical chat. My memory is fine when it comes to things like biographical detail and conversation recall but medical information rarely stays in my mind for long. It might be a good thing. As that earlier piece noted: “Maybe it’s… Continue reading Word of the week: Hyperplasia
Any keen quizzers will almost certainly have come across the following question: If you write out every number as a word, which is the first (and only) one to have all of its letters in alphabetical order? In case you don’t know the answer, you can work it out for yourself by starting with one,… Continue reading Word of the week: Forty
Here’s something I wrote way back February 2016, which still applies today: I often recall these last two lines from the first poem in Ted Hughes’s “Birthday Letters”, “Fulbright Scholars”: At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh By my ignorance of the simplest things I am way past 25 but dumbfounded almost daily by my ignorance… Continue reading Word of the week: Session
Pakie, Packy or Packie, is a diminutive form of the name Patrick. Patrick, as I’m sure you know, is one of the most popular boys’ names in Ireland, more usually abbreviated to Paddy or Pat. I had two uncles baptised with the name of Patrick. My father’s brother was known as Paddy, and the man… Continue reading Word of the week: Pakie
There have been 207 “Word of the week” pieces on this Blog so far. From 1 February 2016, when I decided to post them exclusively on Mondays, there was an unbroken run of 24 weeks each featuring a word that was either in the news or relevant to what I was doing or reading at… Continue reading Word of the week: allotment
Well, this is a treat: Theatricalia.com, “a database of past and future theatre productions.”, a kind of IMDb for UK theatre. It lists actors, directors, productions and places, and has provided me with information that I hadn’t been able to find elsewhere. It doesn’t appear to be as complete as IMDb, which has been owned… Continue reading Word of the week: Theatricalia
You might well have heard of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). You might have read, and understood, his major work, “The Critique of Pure Reason”. I tried to, as part of a political philosophy paper at university, but most of what I wrote in that week’s essay came from HJ Paton’s book “The Moral… Continue reading Word of the Week: Kant
If you follow the game of cricket, you will be familiar with the idea of a nightwatchman, a batsman who comes in at the fall of a wicket in the last few overs of a day’s play. The nightwatchman’s role is to take the pressure off the other batsman: face as many balls as possible,… Continue reading Word of the week: nighthawk
Every piece on this Blog is drafted in a document that also contains hundreds of thousands of words that will never be made available for anyone else to read. Every year I start a new one of these documents, with the word “Snippets” and the year somewhere in the filename. These words are being typed… Continue reading Word of the week: gamechanger
The Compartments 