Talk proper!

“Morphing. Language evolves. The meaning of a word can shift over time as we use it differently….” This latest of WordPress’ ‘365 Days of Writing Prompts’ goes on to invite me to give a common word a new meaning, explain it and use it in the title of the post. This is a temptation to…

A Farewell To Alarms

“Your time to shine: Early bird, or night owl?” There’s a lot to be said for mornings. Nothing’s gone wrong yet and there’s not so many people about, which means less misanthropic scowling to be done. Certainly, I’ve always thought of myself as much more of a morning person than a night owl. Or at least…

Keyhole surgery

“..What are the six impossible things you believe in?..” My initial reaction when I saw this latest of ‘365 Days of Writing Prompts’ was something along the lines of “List! Yay!” However, having thought long and hard about this, the truth is that I’m really struggling to come up with half a dozen impossible things…

Cargo cult

“Undo: If you could uninvent something, what would it be?” Many thanks to the latest ‘365 Days of Writing Prompts’ for this opportunity to have a good, old-fashioned, grumpy old man rant. What would I uninvent? Oh, so many things if I only could. Unfortunately, I have to assume that people cannot be included, so…

Room 101

“1984. You’re locked in a room with your greatest fear. Describe what’s in the room.” So, dear WordPress, in this latest of ‘365 Days of Writing Prompts’, presumably you actually meant to ask ‘what’s in your Room 101?’ The original impact – and import – of the Orwellian Room 101 has been rather lost in…

Designers’ trouble

Has any designer of a designer hotel ever actually bothered to stay in the designer hotel they designed? The reason I ask is that Sugar Magnolia and I have just spent a few nights in a designer hotel in Bordeaux (it actually called itself a ’boutique’, but the term is effectively interchangeable with ‘designer’) .…

You Don’t Really Like Me, Do You?

It’s always nice to get compliments, perhaps especially  from strangers. In the blogosphere, nothing can be better relied on to put a metaphorical spring in the step than getting a WordPress notification that somebody has ‘liked’ your latest post (even if they almost certainly didn’t go so far as to believe that it was ‘pretty…

Dawn Chorus

“There’s someone in my head and it’s not me” Pink Floyd: ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ You know how it is. Some mornings you wake up and there’s a song running through your head, often one that you haven’t heard for years but has somehow been dragged out from down the back of the…