This week Helen at This Thing Called Life One Word At A Time has challenged us to share a song about judgementalism or, as she writes, the opposite – getting rid of judgment and being more accepting. When David Bowie died earlier this year, it seemed to me that a common theme among the many…
First of all, I’m indebted to Linda at lindaghill.com for alerting me to this Song Lyric Sunday Challenge, hosted by Helene Spinosa. This is a great idea and I’m more than happy to play along. No doubt I’m going to be giving my age away on a weekly basis with my selections but what can…
‘I remember the good old days’ – grandson, age 9¼.
(‘Brainless Stupidity’ is a – very – occasional series of diatribes against state-of-the-art manifestations of bovine idiocy masquerading as aids to moden life. Previous targets have included been the Belgian way of buying fuel and Paypal’s bizarre procedures for identity verification.) This time, though, our egregiously cretinous example is the in-car navigation system more or…
Joseph Heller got it right: Last Tuesday lunchtime, much to my chagrin, my iPad wouldn’t open the BBC iPlayer page, thereby depriving Madame and me of the possibility of listening to the News Quiz while chowing down on our baguettes. Disappointing. Madame didn’t seem to have a problem with her iPad so, following my iron…
As a general rule, the one-word Daily Prompts that WordPress has been furnishing in recent months are way too cryptic for someone as devoid of imagination as yours truly. Today, though the word is ‘Sandwich’ and even I can rise to that bait. Who among us has never had a sandwich or – even more…
‘The Job Interview’ was a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary series that aired recently on British TV. It was excruciating, but I watched it because I do like a bit of schadenfreude. Nothing has made me happier about being retired than the thought that I’ll never again have to go through the toe-curling experience of interviewing for a…
Looking back over the increasingly sparse output on this blog, I see that it has become a minor tradition at this time of year to apologise for the paucity of recent output and to offer up some lame excuses for said shortcoming. Not that anybody gives a damn – but one is British after all,…
This blog likes to keep it light. The strapline does lay claim to ‘miscellaneous musings’, but I prefer to focus on humour, or at least my attempts to be amusing. Sometimes, though, it’s hard. And this is one of those days. Unless you’ve spent the last three months incommunicado down a mineshaft, you will probably…
In a searing indictment of the awfulness of French TV, close to 300 people packed into the local village hall (salle polyvalente) on a Saturday night, in order to play bingo or – as they call it here – Loto. We joined them, eschewing the far more uplifting televisual entertainment offered by British programme-makers (Britain’s Got…
the only deadhead in the hameau 