October 2010

Ban the Bob

Sunday, 31 October 2010

Having a birthday at the end of October, the party games when I was a youngster tended to have a Halloween theme. One of the most popular was dry-bobbing for apples. This involved hanging apples from a door lintel by string tied to their stalks. To win the game, you had to take a bite [...]

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The Book of Secrets

Saturday, 30 October 2010

Life has been rather hectic lately and I haven’t many opportunities to go online, other than to work on a website I’m putting together for an acquaintance. There has been some downtime, however, with my latest read The Book of Secrets by Tom Harper. I bought it on the strength of The Lazarus Vault which [...]

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Capital Punishment

Thursday, 28 October 2010

Yorkshire Pudding wrote a thoughtful piece about the purpose of anger the other day and raised some interesting points. Is anger necessarily a bad thing for example? Does it change in nature as we age? I rather think it does. When I was an angry young man I got very hot under the collar about [...]

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O is for Orange

Wednesday, 27 October 2010

It is safe to say there will be no rhymes this week because nothing rhymes with orange. Lozenge is about as near as you can get with an online rhyming dictionary. Left is the Prince of Orange pub on Warrington Street and Wellington Road, Ashton, named after the man who was to become William III [...]

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No Puddings in Sheffield

Monday, 25 October 2010

What a beautiful day it has been — blue skies and not a cloud in sight — perfect for a drive over the Pennines to take my daughter home to Sheffield after a weekend chez mum and dad. The pleasant run ground to halt when we came up against road works at the top of [...]

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A Worker is Worthy of His Wages*

Sunday, 24 October 2010

How on earth can it be right for someone to earn £10 milli0n a year for kicking a ball around? When the rest of country is facing £81 billion in government spending cutbacks and millions are fearful for the jobs? That was the general tone of the media and public reaction to the Wayne Rooney [...]

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Cheeky Baristas

Saturday, 23 October 2010

I’ve mostly given writing about advertising. It’s just too easy and no great sport — I prefer a quarry that likes the fun of the chase and doesn’t just sit there waiting to be shot at. But sometimes I can’t resist taking a potshot.

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Pathetic Fallacy

Friday, 22 October 2010

It’s wonderful what you learn from quiz shows. Until watching Eggheads the other night, I didn’t know that ‘to signify any description of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions‘ is what’s known as a pathetic fallacy. The term was coined by the Victorian social thinker, art critic and Christian [...]

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Divine Nonintervention

Thursday, 21 October 2010

I bumped into the pastor of the local Congregational Church on Tuesday evening. He was busy getting the place ready because he said they had a service at 7am the following morning. This seemed rather early for midweek religious devotion and I racked my brains to see if I could recall the significance of 20 [...]

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