At this stage of my life, and with the world in its current sorry state, to be perfectly honest, my ideal mode of transport would be armchair-based imagination. If that lacks a certain degree of ambition, then something along the lines of ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ would be good, but the technology isn’t there, unfortunately.…
As chance would have it, I actually referred to my most challenging task yesterday. I refer, of course, to the weekly routine of changing the bed linen. The process can be broken down into four parts, the middle two of which – stripping off the old sheets and pillowcases and putting on the new ones…
I spent most of my working life as a financial analyst in the investment business. As my specialist subject was the European banking sector, I saw plenty of corporate restructurings being undertaken, with mixed success. The key question in such exercises, of course, is how to define success. When announcing restructurings, company managements must perforce…
How many book blurbs have you seen which trumpet the claim that ‘this book will change your life’? Dozens, at least. And how many such books really have had a life-changing impact on you? One? Two? None? I can honestly say that there is no book (and I’ve read a fair few in my time)…
Lucky guy that I am – in so many ways – I must have received many gifts in my life that would generally be considered as memorable. However, I have an abiding memory of one Christmas when I was about seven or eight years old. I can’t even remember for sure if I still believed…
Tracing one’s ancestry has become quite the thing in recent years. I first started looking into mine more than twenty years ago while I was, in acting terms, ‘resting’. Or, to put it another way, unemployed. Back then, genealogy was a labour-intensive process that involved ploughing through fat, leather-bound registers of births, marriages and deaths…
Like the road to hell, I started out on this Bloganuary exercise (don’t call it a bloody ‘journey”: if you’re not physically moving from one place to another it is categorically NOT a journey) with good intentions. I managed the first three days fairly straightforwardly, but for some reason I never got the email prompt…
Today’s Bloganuary prompt certainly offers a broad spectrum of potential responses. At the most pedantic level, think about all those silver-laden Spanish ships that sank on their way back to Spain from South America. Or, going even further back, the hapless King John’s baggage train getting lost in The Wash. Still earlier in history, there…
When you get to my age, there’s a tendency for actual memories to metamorphose into mere shadows of their former selves. Thus it is that I can remember what my earliest memory is, but now it’s an indirect recollection rather than something, the details of which I can still recall clearly at first hand, so…
It’s that time of year again, so I’m going to try and grumble my way through another month of totally unnecessary and entirely self-inflicted mental torture by participating in the annual WordPress Bloganuary challenge. So, how am I brave? Well, putting myself through this again could be described as brave, I suppose. Brave or stupid.…
the only deadhead in the hameau 