Over the last two weekends, as usual at this time of year, three TV shows have concluded with public votes (by phone, text and online) to determine the winning contestants: “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here”, “Strictly Come Dancing” and “Sports Personality of the Year”. For the fourth year running, ITV’s “The X Factor” was not part of… Continue reading Votes For Women
Most Tuesday evenings my wife and I run a kind of minicab service for our teenage children. Their extracurricular activities here in West London take them to places that are local but further apart than I realized until last week. Our daughter’s athletics training is at a club to the north and east of where… Continue reading The Tuesday Minicab Service
On “University Challenge” earlier this week there was a good set of questions whose answers all featured every vowel once and once only. There was something similar on a “Missing Vowels” round in “Only Connect” recently. I have spent an hour coming up with more examples and offer them below. The answers to the 20 questions here are all nouns (although… Continue reading Quiz questions: all the answers contain each vowel once
Yesterday evening, for the first time in over a decade, I played a game of football with people my own age. I have been talking for years about getting involved but always made my excuses, and of course for much of the last 20 months the pitches have been closed. In September my son and I watched… Continue reading Back amongst the goals
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
Last year, in this piece about the word “Journal”, I wrote about a Reunion Lunch at my old school, the first such event that I have attended. Of the seven people in my year who were there, five of us are connected through Facebook. I assume that the other two do not have Facebook accounts, like many other people… Continue reading A thousand stories I can’t tell you right now
20 November 2021 is Joe Biden’s 79th birthday. As noted in this piece from January (“Presidential calculations: dates and ages”), he is the oldest person to hold the office of US President. During my research for that piece, I spent rather a lot of time looking at other information related to holders of the office including the Chinese Years that they were born in,… Continue reading A Scorpio Horse in the White House
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
As a family we enjoy a wide range of savoury snacks. We have baskets full of, but not limited to, various flavours of crisps (“potato chips” to our American friends), pretzels of different sizes, mini-poppadums, prawn crackers, Quavers, Wotsits, mini-Cheddars and salted popcorn. My children take a packet or two of snacks to school with them… Continue reading The great Twiglet shortage of ’21
When our corner of West London is mentioned in the news on TV it is often described as a “leafy suburb”. This time of year, that leafiness is very much in evidence. The local streets are covered with the leaves falling from two specific types of tree: London plane, and lime trees. My knowledge of… Continue reading Autumn Leaves
The Compartments 