Picture, if you will, someone writing hundreds of words which omit one specific letter. The missing letter is one of the five vowels, so the writer must choose his or her words with extreme precision. It is difficult enough to do this for five sentences, but whole books exist which use this device from beginning… Continue reading Word of the week: lipogram
Following on from last Friday’s piece, about contracting Covid despite being triple jabbed and super-cautious, I have tested positive again this morning. It’s a whole week since I first saw what a positive test looks like, but now I am not alone. My son tested positive two days ago, on Monday morning. This means that he is on Day… Continue reading And then there were two
Well, I wasn’t expecting this. Despite having three doses of Covid vaccine in the last 9 months, and acting with great caution over the last year and more, I have tested positive for Coronavirus. Three Lateral Flow tests all revealed both red lines, something we had not seen in nearly 9 months of taking tests… Continue reading Triple-jabbed, super-cautious, positive
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
The Compartments 