The thing about working on roofs is that you get to know your birds. We’ve had a cocky little critter strutting about the garden for several weeks – in fact, there it is now – and when Mick the roofer came he identified it as a mistle thrush. This was later confirmed by Dave the builder. (more…)

Now there’s a big word. Big words are under threat. People seem to have got it in for big words.

One of the jobs I do is for a large financial services company, making sure their customer communications are all properly written and, most importantly, readable. That means using plain English. But what is plain English?

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People who know me will be surprised by this but here’s a confession: I can be prone to occasional outbursts of anger. Yep, mild-mannered old me. And I’ll tell you what triggers it: clumsiness. Dropping a small screw, for example, while balancing on a ladder, triggers uncontrolled explosions of loud and determined swearing. Once, when I was rewiring a ceiling rose, I had the neighbours come round and complain. (more…)

I was admiring the ornate ceiling of St Paul’s Cathedral this week, when I remembered that Mick the roofer was coming round to fix some loose tiles. I don’t know about you but whenever I think about roof tiles, Shakin’ Stevens pops into my head. (more…)

Every year at Christmas – and I admit, this isn’t very topical – we sing about two turtle doves, but would you know a turtle dove if you saw one? It’s basically a really pretty pigeon, but there are two good reasons why you’ve probably never seen one at Christmas: 1 They’re the fastest declining bird species in the UK; 2 They’re not here at Christmas. (more…)

Don’t you find it remarkable that after 12,000 years of agriculture, the same questions keep cropping up (pardon the pun)? Is a strawberry a fruit? Is a pea a vegetable? Is a potato a root vegetable? And does it really matter, as long as you eat them all up? (more…)

I’ve just received a message from a friend, warning of a dodgy WhatsApp scam that’s about to land offering an upgrade to WhatsApp Gold. If you fall for it, the message says, the malware will take over your phone and you’ll never be able to play Wordle or swallow clickbait again.

But there was something about this warning message that didn’t ring true. It claimed that it had been on BBC radio, but didn’t say what programme or give a link to it. It said it was called Martinelli, which to me sounded like an obvious pop at Arsenal for failing to win the title for three seasons in a row. Then it mentioned a video not to watch called Dance of the Pope, which is clearly someone having a laugh. And then it said forward this message to as many people as you can. Hmm.

So I did some research. Apparently this message has been circulated before. And it’s a hoax. A hoax about a hoax. Why would anyone do that? Well, the more a message gets circulated, the more it becomes a potential vehicle for actual malicious hacks. So if you get it, folks, don’t pass it on.

My scamdar is on particularly high alert at the moment after falling into a trap that was all the more annoying for being apparently legal and above board. I’m not talking about the TfL ULEZ scheme, nor the parking enforcement at Morrisons. I’m referring to an online shopping platform called greatlook.site.

I was checking my bank statements the other day, wondering where all the money goes, when I found out. Greatlook.site had been helping itself to two payments of €26.95 a month, costing me six hundred odd quid. And there was nothing I could do about it.

Here’s how it works. You become a member of greatlook.site, make regular payments for which they give you credits and you then spend your credits on clothing at a bargain price. There are two reasons why I know I would never knowingly have signed up for this: 1) I never knowingly sign up for things like this; 2) Clothes? Me?

Nevertheless, they informed me that I must have signed up for it as that’s the only way they could have got my bank details. Not entirely true but hey. Their customer service was very responsive, even if it did rapidly descend into that now familiar tactic of responding to my questions with answers to a different question. So I thought OK, if I can’t get my money back, I’ll log in to my account and spend my 600 odd credits. Guess what? There were only about 150. It turns out that your credits expire after 90 days and you lose your money.

And this is legal!

The verb to mug originally meant to punch in the mouth, mug having become a term for the mouth or face around the turn of the 18th century. This undoubtedly would have come from the mug you drink out of, which in turn probably came from Norse words like the very similar Swedish ‘mugg’ (a drinking jug), rather than a portmanteau of ‘mini’ and ‘jug’. There was a fashion for mugs of the time to be designed with grotesque faces, and before long the meaning of mug and face became one. A face, to pull a face, to punch in the face…

The noun meaning a gullible or foolish person was thieves’ slang for a person or ‘face’, not necessarily the victim of a mugging.

So anyway, I spent my remaining credits on a hoodie and a pair of trainers. It seemed appropriate. But to cap it all off, there was no way to specify my size, so of course the trainers came three sizes too small and now I have to send them back. What kind of fiends are these people?

This week I was planning to write about the word geometry but I couldn’t work out an angle. Was that a groan I just heard? Listen, this stuff doesn’t write itself, you know! Anyway, instead I’m turning my thoughts aways from geometry, past trigonometry, algebra and slide rules, towards poetry. (more…)

If you’re one of those peculiar people who regard football as a silly pastime involving 22 men (or women) chasing a ball around while thousands of other people get really worked up about it, as opposed to a religion that brings meaning and purpose to life and teaches us about love and loss and hope and despair, apologies for what follows, but this is a story bigger than football. It’s a story of human frailty and the quest for redemption. It could be a metaphor for something, you never know. (more…)

There’s a frog in South America, the tadpole of which is bigger than the finished frog. Yes, you read that right. Because of this Benjamin Buttonesque approach to adolescence, it goes by the name of the paradoxical frog. The tadpole of the paradoxical frog grows to 11 inches in length – one big tadpole. Then, during metamorphosis, it shrinks to leave a dinky little frog that measures barely 3cm from bum to beak.

Not that it has a beak. (more…)