As you may have noticed, eSwatini is the new name for the African nation previously known as Swaziland. This BBC Country Profile tells us that it is one of the world’s few remaining absolute monarchies, and that the change of name was announced by its king, Mswati III, in 2018, “a move critics said was… Continue reading Word of the week: eSwatini
Pho, as you may know, is a Vietnamese dish, defined by the Cambridge Dictionary website as “a type of soup … usually containing noodles (= long, thin strips made from flour, water, and often egg) and small pieces of meat”. Pho is also the name of a chain of restaurants here in the UK, describing… Continue reading Word of the week: pho
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
Prince Andrew has been in the news here in the UK. The Duke of York, to use one of his titles, was, until 1982, second in line to the throne. He has now slipped to eighth in line, so unless there’s some 21st century plot to move him up the list, along the lines of… Continue reading Word of the week: car-crash
Earlier this month I wrote about Saul Bellow’s 1976 memoir “To Jerusalem and Back”, noting that I would “mention it again soon on these pages”. The phrase that prompted me to write that earlier piece, and which can be found on page 108 of my “Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics” edition, was “Now that the reading… Continue reading Word of the week: marginalia
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
We are half-way through the latest series of “Strictly Come Dancing”. As noted before on this Blog, this BBC1 show is the most-watched TV programme here in the UK, and constitutes a large part of our family viewing. Most Saturday evenings the four of us are gathered in the living-room for the live show, and… Continue reading Word of the week: spoiler
Earlier this month Cardinal John Henry Newman was canonized in Rome. The ceremony took place on Sunday 13 October, the Feast of St Edward the Confessor. I wasn’t there, but I was at the mass in September 2010 when Newman was beatified. It was the first such mass on English soil for many hundreds of… Continue reading Word of the week: Newman
As you may know, McCarthy is one of the more numerous Irish surnames. According to this page on the Irish Genealogy website, detailing the 20 most common surnames in Ireland from an 1890 study, it was 13th on the list. There have been plenty of prominent McCarthy’s in living memory, including Mick (past and current… Continue reading Word of the week: McCarthy
Early in 2016, I wrote this piece about words and phrases that seem to crop up regularly in prize-winning fiction. One of them was antimacassar, “a piece of cloth put over the back of a chair to protect it from grease or hair-oil – macassar was used as a hair oil in Victorian and Edwardian… Continue reading Word of the week: antimacassar
The Compartments 