“State of your year. Write up a mid-year ‘State of my Year’ post.” Still alive, still married, still solvent. The rest is detail. No news is good news, but it doesn’t provide much meat for a new post. Instead, let’s look at how things are going in relation to the ‘365 Days of Writing Prompts’…
“Flip flop. Think of a topic or issue about which you’ve switched your opinion. Why the change? Nobody likes to admit they’re wrong and frankly it’s a little embarrassing to tell everyone (ha!) about how I couldn’t see the point of an iPad at all when they first came out. If you tried to take…
“Far from home. Tell us about the farthest you’ve ever travelled from home.” There’s a website – of course there is: did you really think there wouldn’t be? – that will tell you the precisely opposite position on the globe to wherever you are in the world. Useful to know. Thus it tells me that if, unaccountably, I…
“Barter System. If the world worked on a barter system, how would you fare?” The latest instalment of ‘365 Days of Writing Prompts’ is actually a repeat of the Daily Prompt from exactly a year ago, which moved me to post the following piece. According to WordPress statistics, that particular little gem has only been…
“No longer a mere mortal. You’ve imbibed a special potion that makes you immortal…How will you live life differently, knowing you’ll always be around to be accountable for your actions?” It’s not like me to turn down the offer of a drink, but I’d certainly think at least twice before taking a slug of this…
“21st century citizen. Do you belong in this day and age? If you do, explain why – and if you don’t, when in human history would you rather be?” A bit tricky this one, because there’s good and bad today, and there was certainly both good and bad in the old days. In the interests of…
“No, thank you. If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?” There’s not much point in trying to ban words. Certainly, there are some words that represent ugly concepts, but banning the word wouldn’t abolish the ugliness represented by the sound, or its look on the page. Forbidding…
“What’s the biggest risk you’d like to take – but haven’t been able to? What would have happened to make you comfortable taking it?” Mortal peril is what springs most immediately to mind when, as with this latest in the series of ‘365 Days of Writing Prompts’, we’re encouraged to consider the concept of risk. Which is ironic in a way,…
You may have seen that the State opening of Parliament took place last week. This is when Her Majesty blocks the traffic in central London to go to the House of Lords and deliver ‘the Queen’s Speech’. This homily – not written by the Queen herself, of course, – essentially sets out what the government plans…
By Jean Le Bidon, Chief Investigative Reporter, ‘Le Quotidien de Faire-le-Dodo (87)’ A number of residents have recently contacted Le Quotidien, reporting increasingly strange behaviour by members of the English expatriate community. “it’s very odd” said Jean-Claude Gazole, cashier at the Trop-Cher-Essence petrol station on the old Limoges road, “but lately I’ve seen a lot of the rosbif flying…
the only deadhead in the hameau 