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?),…
Browsing my news sources this morning, I happened to spot this little item on the Sky News website, under the headline “Prince ‘Fighting Flu After Emergency Landing’”: Now, I have nothing whatsoever against Prince, who is an accomplished and very interesting musician (57 though: who knew?) and I wish him a speedy recovery. However, this…
Some of you may be wondering whatever happened to the public service joint venture – announced with so much fanfare at the beginning of last year – between this blog and the local newspaper, ‘Le Quotidien de Faire-le-Dodo (87)’. Late last year Le Quotidien, like so many other print journals faced with rising print costs…
My broad aversion to travel has been well documented in these pages. To be clear, though, while A (home) is always to be preferred, I’ve no objections whatsoever to B, C or – venturing further afield – even D. Being somewhere else is fine, it’s the getting there that I don’t care for. That’s because…
Many French expressions have found their way into everyday usage in the Anglophone world. Think of fait accompli, for example, or le mot juste. Even that (allegedly) archetypal British character trait, sang-froid. I could throw in déjà vu as well, but you’ve probably already seen it. There’s rather less linguistic traffic in the other direction, which is probably…
the only deadhead in the hameau 