Bloganuary Day 19: Warning – today I am wearing my ‘grumpy old man’ head. Write about something mysterious. I’m grateful to today’s instalment of Bloganuary for providing this opportunity to have a rant, thereby further cementing my carefully cultivated image of general misanthropy. Most thing are at least something of a mystery to me, so…
Bloganuary Day 8: Finally, a chance for a rant… What do you like most about your writing? I spent most of my working life writing for a living. As an investment analyst, the constant churning out of ‘reports’ was what I was supposed, and paid, to do. I like to think that I was quite…
‘Social Media’. Harrumph. Why am I even talking about this? Because WordPress ‘365 Days of Writing Prompts wants to know, that’s why: “The social network. Do you feel like you ‘get’ social media, or do you just use it because that’s where all your friends and family are?” Should you happen to be a WordPress…
Honestly, you wait weeks on end for a new post, and then they all come along together… It has to be said that waste management is pretty well organised here in France. As a matter of course everyone recycles their plastic, glass and paper into the relevant coloured bins at the local déchetterie – and…
(‘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…
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…
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…
Following the runaway success (25 views in only nine months) of last October’s guest post by legendary hardline activist Dave Spart, we’ve listened to the clamour of our public and invited him back to give us his unflinchingly austere analysis of the highly topical subject of summer holidays. Although, quite frankly, he owes us one. since we invited him…
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…
the only deadhead in the hameau 