So, dear reader, which of the captions listed below goes best with this picture? A. That is positively the last time I set foot in a Wetherspoons. B. To be honest, I’m starting to rethink this whole Botox idea. C. No I did NOT say your bum looked big in that. D. Yeah? Well, you…
Does it not strike you as odd that the expression ‘He’d be late for his own funeral’ is used as a criticism of somebody’s timekeeping? It mean, it’s hardly fair to criticise the stiff in question, since presumably by that stage all matters relating to punctuality will be out of their own hands and down…
‘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,…
Last year, in an escalation of the ceaseless struggle against ever encroaching weeds – if you wanted to flaunt your French vocabulary, you could call it the war on terroir – I traded up from an electric to a petrol-driven lawnmower. Despite my initial concerns, this has actually turned out to be rather effective: to…
It’s my birthday later this week. Given the title of this post, you may want to hazard a guess as to how old I’ll be…. Well done. Did you immediately think of the classic Beatles song from Sergeant Pepper? Me too. Sergeant Pepper came out in 1967 (fiftieth anniversary next year: how scary is that?),…
the only deadhead in the hameau 