Our local pub always does a Burns Night, and we're going to it tomorrow with M's mum, despite my own feelings about Burns ( Read more... )

The Communications boys and girls in my university department, relentlessly doing the cheerleader thing and jollying the worker bees along, have announced an Olympics Poetry Contest, and asked us to submit entries - poems on the theme of the London 2012 Games, in any form or metre.

That got my muse to the starting blocks in no time, and why should ( Read more... )

I've just watched it, and I have to say that it just blew me away. You really don't have to give a damn about the Windsor family individually or collectively to think that this film is bloody marvellous ( Read more... )

This afternoon at work I was accessioning some journals to the departmental library, among them the latest issue of Travel Medicine, which contains an article entitled as above.

It proved to be written by three ENT surgeons from a university hospital in Rome, and to concern two middle-aged Italians who came to their ENT clinic complaining that they ( Read more... )

I read the news story and saw the video of the European couple who went to ‘renew their wedding vows’ in the romantic Maldives. There they were smiling shyly as the sweet simple islanders blessed their love, not realising that the hotel employee conducting the ‘ceremony’ in the local language was alternately reading out hotel employment regulations ( Read more... )

It was at Alison's (his new girlfriend's) house, it being much bigger than his own, and through my brother who's secretary of the London Charity Orchestra he had found a violinist and pianist to play the Franck Piano Sonata. So we started with a drink, then had the music - they were really brilliant, everyone was riveted - and then lunch. A ( Read more... )

M and I were sitting in our garden a couple of days ago, saying to each other that we really must haul the fig tree back and attach it to the garden wall - it was obviously planted to be an  espalier, but because it's never been attached to the wall it's sagging forward and getting in the way. It really ought to have been severely pruned this ( Read more... )

One of the party texted or tweeted or something from Kilimanjaro to my cousin who has emailed the news to everyone - the whole party has made it to the top, except for my brother Phil who had to retreat due to mountain sickness ( Read more... )

This is one of my favourite world proverbs:

In a situation where an English-speaker would say “We’re not out of the woods yet”, a Hungarian peasant will mutter darkly, “Hátravan még a feketeleves” - “The black soup is yet to come ( Read more... )

It's been bedlam at home in the last few weeks. The besiegers have got inside the walls - i.e. they are now working in the front of the house as well as the back, so you walk out of the bathroom and fall over a painter or a central heating engineer. There is sawdust and stonedust everywhere; our belongings are piled in heaps in the few rooms that ( Read more... )