Consider the speech of these four people:

1) Lorraine Kelly 2) Robert Burns 3) The Queen 4) Delboy Trotter from Only Fools and Horses

In my mind, the number of languages in that list is either 1 or 4. Only by some lopsided standard could there be two.

I have just spent the whole morning teaching a Spanish girl how to say "kettle". What larks we had! We narrowed it to "kittle", which I thought she said rather charmingly, so left it at that. Just 499 999 words left.

Toilet walls in upmarket areas of Edinburgh reveal an intellectual bittersweetness, like that of people who lose a lover but gain a son ( Read more... )

Having spent the weekend in Barcelona, I now realise that culture, like accent, is one of those things that everyone thinks they lack until they go elsewhere. A country without a culture is like a shape without a size: impossible ( Read more... )

I have incurred a fat student debt. Maybe debt is the sign of a young man moving on in life?


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There is a fine line between the beautiful and the squalid, in behaviour and architecture ( Read more... )

When someone talks about something being an "illegal war", I always wonder what they think a legal war would be. A blood sport, surely ( Read more... )

An amazing stroke of luck: I met with a slightly forsaken circle of friends a week ago, and one of them less familiar to me offered me work in teaching English to foreigners, if I complete the prerequired six-month study. I was anxious about whether I'd be able to progress from there. Life seems to be quite sychronous lately.

I shall be slinking reluctantly off to Cambridge soon where my father is ensconced in a house with my spurious future in-laws. I'd rather stay in Scotland where all is mealow and lush and scatterbrained.

I looked in the mirror today after shaving carefully, and decided that I look fourteen, although I am twenty-one. My eyes are soft, like a child's. I look just like my passport photo of when I was 16. There was not enough childish chubbiness there to make me look thirteen. I don't look like I did when I was fourteen, but only for stubble and ( Read more... )