Happy 2010 everyone, and I hope you all had an enjoyable “Wintermezzo”. Let’s kick off the New Year with some handy advice gleaned from one of my son’s Christmas presents, a radio-controlled toy. Useful information on how to deal with any psychopathic megalomaniac, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Next Week: Is Pol Pot machine-washable?
Following weeks of speculation it has been announced that Phill Jupitus is to resign as a comedian. In a statement read out earlier today by his agent it was confirmed that Mr Jupitus is to wind-up all his comedic responsibilities by the end of the week.
While for years Mr Jupitus’s continued employment as a comedian [...]
Gove [gōv] v.i. to stare stupidly.
eg. The Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families was happy to criticise government policy, but could only gove when asked to describe how his party would do things differently.
No, really.
(Hat-tip: Mrs. Quinn.)
I drive my own car. I fill it up at the pumps, and when diesel hit 121.9p per litre, which I paid outside Chipping Norton a couple of weeks ago, it really struck me that there was an intriguing advert on the forecourt of the filling station.
“A great way to start your day,” the advert [...]
Yesterday our aging Rover 216 sailed through its MOT*; much to our surprise, and that of the mechanic at the garage who, following a cursory look at our car, was astonished and gutted to find that, try as he might, he was unable to locate anything he could fail it on. As a treat we [...]
Apostrophes can be a problem; just ask those brain boxes on The Apprentice who on last week’s programme debated for around three hours whether it should be Single’s Day, Singles’ Day or Singles Day. (Singles’ Day, in my opinion, as it is both plural and possessive.) But who hasn’t made the odd mistake, writing “it’s” [...]
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
Which reminds me, of one of my most abiding early journalistic experiences, back in the day when I was a young cub reporter for the now sadly defunct Daily Splim. The Splim, you may remember, was a somewhat revisionist, iconoclastic publication. It delighted in taking conventional [...]
We wandered back up to the Lake District last week, and spring having been sprang there were certainly plenty of Wordsworthian daffodils playing host to us; but also, in a house shop in Bowness-on-Windermere, I spotted this wondrous sight.
Now, no doubt the scholarly amongst you will claim that there is no contradiction in this instruction; [...]
Following the drainage work done on our house to prevent it from subsiding into the mud, and the subsequent mayhem of having to cram four rooms worth of our accumulated belongings into a room-and-a-half while the plasterers and painters erased all memories of the cracks in the walls upstairs, we decided to take advantage of [...]
If you were paying attention at the tail end of last year (and there’s no particular reason why you should have been) then you’ll know that I like cartoons, and Tom & Jerry in particular. I’ll regularly watch a couple of their animated shorts with my son last thing before we pack him off to [...]