The BBC Radio 2 mid-morning quiz Pop Master has been mentioned many times on this Blog. There are pieces that list all the questions for an entire week (such as this one from 2021) and pieces that summarize my scores and only list the Bonus questions and the ones that I got wrong (such as… Continue reading Pop Master: 1,000 maximum scores
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
Over the last couple of years I have caught up regularly with a handful of guys I was at school with over 50 years ago. There have been meals out, nights on the beer, weekly games of football. Some of my old classmates have come to see my monthly live performances at a local pub.… Continue reading Unfriending Dead People
Last month I posted this piece about the dozen Oscar-winners that I have seen perform on stage (11 in London, one in Stratford-on-Avon). To jog my memory before drafting it I “spent a few hours … going through all the theatre programmes that I have collected over the last 50 years”. I then put the… Continue reading 50 years’ worth of theatre programmes
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
Here’s something I prepared earlier, and never finalized. It was drafted over three years ago in January 2020, the 25th anniversary of my first visit to the USA. I offer it here as a record of that first trip, to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. There are over 1,300 words in this… Continue reading Sundance 1995
Earlier this month, in this piece, I reflected on the recent fortunes of Leeds United and Arsenal in the FA Cup, the world’s oldest national football competition. Leeds (the team that I have followed since childhood) had not won a game in the competition since 2017. During that time Arsenal (the team that my wife… Continue reading Further reflections on the FA Cup, Leeds United and Arsenal
During the Christmas holidays, prompted by nothing in particular, I was thinking of three productions of “Richard II” that I have seen here in London over the last 20 years, and the actors who played the title role. The first production, at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2003, starred Mark Rylance. The second, in 2005, featured Kevin… Continue reading 11 Oscar winners on the London stage, and one in Stratford-on-Avon
Take a look at these two beauties, a pair of rotary telephones that we had stored away for many years. They were out of sight but have recently been brought back into the open. The one on the right is the phone that we used throughout my childhood. I don’t remember any earlier ones, so… Continue reading Rotary Telephones
The Album Charts here in the UK are not what they used to be. This page on the Official Chart Company website, “All The Number 1 Albums”, lists every chart-topping album going back to the first official chart in 1956. It shows how things have changed in the intervening decades. In the early years there… Continue reading The Album Charts are not what they used to be
The Compartments 