My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk. Ahh that post tax return feeling. You can’t beat it.

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Many moons ago, when we were young and free and we used to go for drinks in random locations wherever the car of whoever was driving came to rest, we found ourselves in an upstairs bar in Leatherhead, the room beneath which had just been hosting Bullseye on the road, with Jim ‘Bully’ Bowen himself.

Now, across the bar from us, the after party was in full swing. (more…)

I arrived on a video call this week in the middle of a discussion about the meaning of ‘afternoon’. Sean, quite reasonably, was saying he’d always interpreted it to mean the period of the day after noon, noon being midday. Tracy, however, was saying she always regarded afternoon as the period of the day after lunch – 2pm onwards in her case.

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Here’s a word that has fallen from grace somewhat in recent years. When I was a lad back in the 70s, the idea of personal grooming for blokes was as alien as straight trousers and 24 hour electricity. Beards were straggly monstrosities for collecting beer and peanuts, not carefully crafted facial topiary, preened with exotic oils. Sure, there were ads for Brut 33, which did require Kevin Keegan and Henry Cooper to strip down to the waist, but men in pants adorning the pages of glossy magazines? Nah.

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Every day’s a school day, as the saying goes, and it’s a wonderful privilege of being alive that you’re never too old to learn. Facts that seem obvious to some people from a young age can evade others until much later in life.

For example, I must have been in my 40s before I learned that if you start one key to the right when touch typing, it all comes out in Welsh.

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Weird word weird. It breaks the ‘i before e except after c’ rule for a start. And here’s a peculiar thing. Since the end of the Seventies, the word ‘weird’ has seen a tenfold increase in usage. This is weird indeed, since weirdness itself has been in steady decline.

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Over the last few months I’ve been building a home in the garden for my 95-year-old dad. After much soul searching, I decided against using twigs and grass cuttings and am doing it properly, with wood and bricks and everything. He’s a lucky man.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the Inbox… “Oh, he’s back.” Yep. It was just a brief sojourn. I’ve been working on another project, you see, entitled 100 Reasons Not To Get A Dog. I won’t give away the plot, but many of you will know this already because Substack, the platform on which I decided to serialise said work, took it upon itself to mail the first post out to all of my contacts! That includes half a dozen Doha taxi drivers and a number of old friends who are no longer with us. If you received it, I apologise.

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How many bars in a sonnet? Count them.

Shall I compare thee to a Lindt choc bar?
Thou art more nutty and more sugar sweet
Rough truckers eat the Yorkie and the Mars
And Snickers bars get stuck between the teeth
Sometime too soon the Curly-Wurly melts
And often is the Galaxy too warm
And Crème Eggs leave you feeling less than svelt
While Dairy Milk plays havoc with your form
But thy eternal sweetness shall not Flake
Nor Double Deckers Rolo-ver your day
But shall the Minstrels Revel in your wake
And Boost the Bounty of your Milky Way
So long as I can eat my Lindt choc bar
So long lives this, the chocolate that you are

I’d like to begin with an apology. Due to a blockage in the pipe, those of you who get this in your email Inbox will have received the word Hull on Wednesday this week, rather than last Friday when it was supposed to go out. I understand that this led some of you to believe that the end of the week had arrived, and there was understandable upset when you realised it hadn’t. I am deeply sorry for any distress this caused and I will make sure it never happens again.

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