Monday night is quiz night, as explained in this piece from March 2020. For five successive years, starting in summer 2019, we have had a trio of serious quiz programmes scheduled between 7.30pm and 9pm on BBC2 on a Monday night: “Mastermind”, “Only Connect”, “University Challenge”, in that order. There is no money at stake… Continue reading Not ready for the new quiz season
Sad news from the musical backwaters where I have been known to dip my toes. Musician and producer Pat Collier died last month aged 72. Currently there is only one obituary that I can find, on the Louder Than War website. There are mentions on Facebook but not much else for now. As the article… Continue reading Pat Collier RIP
In this piece from June 2022 I mentioned a JetPunk quiz which gives you 15 minutes to list 196 countries: the 193 sovereign states recognized by the UN and three others which are not officially recognized as countries (Vatican City, Kosovo and Taiwan). My daughter had spent much of the most recent half-term holiday taking… Continue reading JetPunk 392/392
Here’s a list of the songs that I performed in public for the first time during July 2024. Each month I aim to play at least one new song from each of the following repertoires: Songs that reached #1 in the UK. Songs that reached #1 somewhere else. Songs that have not reached #1 anywhere.… Continue reading Repertoire: Songs debuted in July 2024
As mentioned many times on this Blog, I can sing and play Number One Hits from every year in UK chart history. This piece from April 2019 documents the songs that I had played in a pub in Hammersmith through to October that year. In the five years since then I have played scores of… Continue reading “Nothing Compares 2U”
For reasons that I do not want to go into right now I have been the long-term custodian of lots of stuff that is not mine: other people’s stuff. By long-term I mean 15 years or more. Some of the people who acquired this stuff in the first place have never attempted to reclaim it,… Continue reading What it costs to fill a box, and what it’s worth now
Gaelic Games (hurling and Gaelic football) are mentioned most years somewhere on this Blog. These words are drafted in West London but they relate to sport in Ireland. Last July, in this piece, I wrote about Kilkenny’s defeat to Limerick in the All-Ireland hurling final. Kilkenny, my father’s county, has been the most successful hurling… Continue reading A Strange Gaelic Season (July 2024)
The words “heart” and “apart” are often used as rhymes, in song lyrics and in poetry. Shakespeare used this rhyme. So have Bob Dylan, Hal David and Dorothy Fields, so there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s got form, you know. But, as I have noted previously, in this Menu Item, and in this piece from… Continue reading The lyricist who never rhymed “heart” and “apart”, or so I thought
As noted in this earlier piece, I have finally acquired a pair of reading glasses, after years of compensating for my gradually deteriorating eyesight with the aid of magnifying glasses. It has not prompted a reading binge, but it has made it easier to do the puzzles in the weekend paper, as I expected. An… Continue reading Digging out my old music books
I graduated from my university of choice just over 40 years ago, on Friday 29 June 1984. The following weekend my brother got married, in Spain. You can find a few details about the latter event, with a mention of my graduation, in this piece (“The best hour’s sleep I ever had”). My university of… Continue reading “The happiest day of my life”
The Compartments 