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Last week I took the liberty of plagiarising a joke about cabinet making. It was a joke worth nicking, I thought, and I know that at least two of you had never heard it before, so that made it worthwhile. “No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another,” as Charles Dickens once said.
You may have received an email recently (or perhaps 400 emails) encouraging you to pivot. And you may have thought, “Bit rude.” But that wouldn’t have been the intention. While ‘pivot’ may mean the same thing as ‘swivel’ in engineering terms, its use in vernacular English is quite different.
So, having advised you all to spend your weeks of isolation sitting under a tree, I’ve discovered that I crave the occasional change of scene. Fortunately, the scene is changing day by day, as buds burst and petals drop, but I can feel a creeping sense of repetition with which I’m not entirely comfortable. When are these flipping blue skies going to end?
Oh, there they go. (more…)
Every crisis throws up a new buzzword. Remember ‘prorogue’? Seems so long ago now, doesn’t it? The Falklands War gave us ‘yomp’. Liverpool winning the League gave us… no, it’s gone. And now COVID-19 has given us ‘furlough’.
Many people have found themselves ‘furloughed’ in the last couple of weeks, raising a number of questions about the use of this antiquated word. “Will it mean a pay cut?”, “How long will it last?” and “Why isn’t it pronounced ‘fluff’?” (more…)
Day three: egg and beans on toast for lunch again.
Funny, isn’t it? You spend your life wishing the wheels would slow down, the traffic would stop, the noise would abate, wishing you could hear the birds sing, smell the flowers, have space to think… and when it happens, aaaaarrggh!
(more…)
Today is Friday 13th. As if we haven’t got enough to worry about. In fact, we’ve got a pandemic to panic about – a pandemic that’s causing pandemonium. A pandemic that’s causing pandemonium in Pangbourne.
You’ll have noticed that all these words begin with ‘pan’ and you’ve probably guessed what’s coming next: they’re all related, right? (more…)
Today is my brother’s birthday. I’d like to buy him a present but the choice is so hard. Most of the gifts I’ve ever bought him have lost their value the moment he finished drinking them. (more…)
Do you ever get accused of being negative? It’s an impossible one to come back from, isn’t it? What can you say? “No I’m not.”
(more…)
It’s hard to say this when there are otters swimming down your street and your living room’s knee deep in sewage but we ought to be grateful for the rain. It’s a wet planet we live on – 71% of its surface is covered in water (probably more like 72% at the moment) – and that is what makes it our home.
We are wet. More than 50% of the human body is water and if we don’t drink the stuff for three days we die. Simple as that. We wouldn’t last long on Mars.
The reason I’m telling you all this stuff you probably already know is because of the word dishevelled. I’ll explain. (more…)
Apologies if you’re still recovering from filling in your Tax Return and have had it up to here with forms, but this won’t tax you, there are no cookies to approve and, as an incentive, I’ve thrown in an interesting fact about cheap worktops that you might want to share in the pub this evening. I’m not here to bother you with questions. Well, apart from these two…
