“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…
“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” The filling protocol of petrol stations in Belgium defies both belief and logic. For the benefit of my North American reader, I should just explain that over here a petrol station is what you would call a gas station. Why you would…
“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…
During my first year as a student at the University of Kent, between October 1970 and June 1971, I lived in room E1 S4 of Eliot College. Why ‘E1 S4’? You may well ask. Simple really: it was room number 4 in the south corridor on the first (ground) floor of the east block of the…
the only deadhead in the hameau 