Today is the Feast of the Annunciation. It commemorates, as you may know, the angel Gabriel announcing to the Virgin Mary that she is “with child”. For many years now we have been able to discuss this event with a memory from my daughter’s first Nativity Play at her primary school. The boy chosen to… Continue reading “Mary! You’re gonna have a baby!”
Recently, while I was hunched over a spreadsheet on my laptop at the kitchen table, my 10-year-old daughter asked, “Is that Excel?” It was. “Can I show you something?” she asked. In a blank cell, in a new blank workbook, she typed the following: =1+1 When she pressed Return the number 2 appeared in the… Continue reading Word of the week: BODMAS
JOMO: the joy of missing out. Last night I decided against a late-night celebration of St Patrick’s Day and was fast asleep before 10pm. I didn’t even have a symbolic beer to celebrate Ireland’s national saint. As I mentioned last year, in this piece about giving things up for Lent, St Patrick’s Day has become… Continue reading JOMO: no beer on St Patrick’s Day
At least one of the following things happens every day of my life: I notice yet another song on TV, radio or a playlist that rhymes “heart” and “apart”; I have to type a whole word on my phone that has not been anticipated by predictive text; I hear someone say “No pressure” in an… Continue reading “No Pressure”
In this piece from last year, about my daughter reading Ian Serraillier’s “The Silver Sword”, I noted that we had a copy of the book throughout my childhood, and I never even opened it, not once. The same goes for Clive King’s “Stig of the Dump”. Unlike Serraillier’s book, which I haven’t been able to… Continue reading “Stig of the Dump” and typefaces
Tony Blackburn is back on BBC Radio 2, our radio station of choice. I am very pleased about this. He’s on for an hour on Friday nights at 7pm and on Saturday mornings between 6 and 8am, broadcasting live. For the latter he has taken over the “Sounds of the 60s” slot from Brian Matthew… Continue reading Tony Blackburn
There was a lovely question on “The Chase” recently about numbers and Scrabble, along these lines: if the following numbers are spelt with Scrabble tiles, which one is the same as its Scrabble score? The options were: Ten, Eleven, Twelve. You’ll probably work it out but if you want to double check, the correct answer… Continue reading Board Games and Quiz Questions
My post from January (“Every pub in my postcode”), which reported that I had drunk at least one pint of beer in every pub in London W4 at some point in my life, was inaccurate. It turns out there are two more bars that I hadn’t considered, both in the new development opposite Gunnersbury station.… Continue reading Every pub in my postcode (postscript)
A yad is a pointer used in a synagogue to trace the text in the Torah. A rabbi will not run his finger across the parchment, he uses a yad instead. We learnt this over the weekend as part of my 12-year-old son’s RE homework, which involved learning at least three of the things that… Continue reading Word of the week: yad
Do you remember loom bands? They were quite the thing in the summer of 2014. Children all over the UK and Ireland were busy making rings and bracelets out of tiny rubber bands. My daughter was seven at the time and, like most of her classmates, spent much of her leisure time working on them.… Continue reading Loom bands
The Compartments 