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…
If they can update the seven wonders of the world to modern times, perhaps it’s worth thinking about a new list of modern sins. A recent WordPress Daily Prompt – they seem to be on a bit of a roll at the moment – had the great idea of asking what your eighth deadly sin would…
When I finally managed to shift myself and publish a new post recently I think I was fair enough to apportion blame. Which is to say that I claimed it wasn’t all my fault. In particular, I railed against the absence of sufficiently inspiring daily prompts from WordPress – and it was while doing so that…
There’s a bit of a thread going on over at Mollytopia, based on (up to) 100 questions you’ve never been asked. On the principle of never looking a gift horse in the mouth in the constant struggle to come up with something to say on this blog, here are a few (37 to be exact) of my own responses:…
Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s good to see you, but on balance I suppose I’m glad that you’re still around – even if you are a grumpy-looking old sod. If I think back to your 1975 iteration, your first as a grown-up, you were a grumpy-looking young sod. In…
Oh WordPress, you shouldn’t have got me started. A recent Daily Prompt asked about punctuation. In particular, it asked ‘do you overuse exclamation marks? Do you avoid semicolons like the plague? What type of punctuation could you never live without?’ Like it says on Wikipedia, punctuation is: “the use of spacing, conventional signs, and certain typographical…
I got on a bus recently. Let me tell you, my life is one long party. I had a suitcase with me so, wanting to stay close to the luggage rack, I flopped down in the nearest seat, only noticing a couple of minutes later that it was one prioritised for the elderly and infirm. My…
My passport went off for renewal last week. Naturally, the application process entailed getting some new identity photos. Or, as it’s also known, a reality check. Compared to ten years ago I’m rather paler (the Abu Dhabi tan has long faded) and the face fungus is still a comparatively recent addition. Otherwise, not too bad really: a little more…
As a general rule I deal with the day-to-day vagaries of modern life by, if not quite ignoring them, at least treating their impingements on my consciousness with what I like to think of as a placid stoicism. By and large, to use a modern idiom, IDGAF. Sometimes, though, only a rant can help. Like…
You have no idea how much of a struggle it’s been not to start this post with the word ‘So’. For that is our subject today, dear reader. More particularly, the increasingly pervasive practice of begiinning sentences with this poor, innocent syllable. To borrow another common modern usage: WTF? This has been going on for years now,…
the only deadhead in the hameau 