Some years, during the season of Lent, I make regular visits to the graveyard where my mother is buried. In those years the grave will be made ready for her anniversary, on 10 April, without too much of a rush. Other years, like last year, we only plant new flowers a day or two before… Continue reading Fell asleep, passed, lost, slipped away
Two weeks ago, in this Word of the Week piece, I was looking forward to cheering Elise Christie to her first medals at a Winter Olympics, from several thousand miles away. We were able to see her semi-final and final in the 500m speed skating event the following day, during the children’s half-term, but her… Continue reading Word of the week: gutted
Welcome to The Compartments, a regularly updated Blog from West London. There is something here for you if: You are over ten years old; You are able to read articles of 500 words or more; You have access to the web. Even if you are under 11 there is probably something for you here, on… Continue reading Welcome. There is something here for you
Last Saturday I drove to Oxford and back, from here in West London, to see legendary punk-poet John Cooper Clarke. He played at the O2 Academy on Cowley Road. I travelled with a couple of friends and my 13-year-old son, none of whom had seen him on stage before. I first saw him perform in… Continue reading 40 years of John Cooper Clarke
In these two pieces last month (Anthony Trollope never had this trouble and “Let’s cross this one off your list”) I recorded my latest experiences with Windows 10. Rather a lot of time was lost to software updates. Instead of dwelling on this lost time and the frustrations caused by these updates I will report rather more… Continue reading Reading View and Slide Shows
Aegilops is “an abscess or ulcer of the inner canthus of the eye, especially when involving a lacrimal duct or the lacrimal sac”. It is also “any grass of the southern European genus Aegilops, considered to be the wild ancestor of modern varieties of domestic wheat”. Like many of the definitions in these Word of… Continue reading Word of the week: aegilops
Two years ago I wrote regularly about Earworms, beginning with this piece, prompted by the Queen song “Keep yourself alive”. There were enough pieces to justify creating a Category for them, but it hasn’t been used since last May. Even in 2016 some of these posts recorded the fact that there were no Earworms stuck… Continue reading Three recent Earworms, and why there might not be many more
There’s a well-known scene in the first “Home Alone” movie that has stayed with me since I first saw it in the 1990s. It’s when Kevin (played by Macaulay Culkin) is at the supermarket on his own. It includes him saying to the woman at the check-out, “Ma’am, I’m 8 years old. Do you think… Continue reading Another Ash Wednesday
After last week’s featured word (Superbowl) here’s another with a sporting theme, prompted by the start of the Winter Olympics from Pyeongchang in South Korea. “Luge” is defined by the Oxford Dictionaries website as a noun (“A light toboggan for one or two people, ridden in a sitting or supine position”), a mass noun (“A… Continue reading Word of the week: Luge
We live in an era of Big Data. More information is being recorded and stored in more ways than ever before. I am reminded of a phrase that a friend uses, light-heartedly, about the super-rich: they have “more money than a million people could count in a million years”. That phrase, and the way he… Continue reading Big Data and small data
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