Being English, I put the clocks in my house forward yesterday (I mean ‘rather than being American, in which case I’d have done it a couple of weeks ago’ not ‘I put the clocks forward whilst wearing a top hat and smoking a pipe’). Although really, my putting the clocks forward had a lot more [...]
Like a lot of people in the North-West of England, I was raised Catholic. And, like most of those, I got better. But 16 years of indoctrination through education can’t fail to leave its mark on you. There are little things, of course – like knowing that Zebedee isn’t just one of the characters in [...]
Over the weekend, I appear to have grown a grotesque, painful abscess in my lower jaw. I don’t want to exaggerate, but I think I can safely say that this is the single most painful experience the world has ever known. You hear women going on about things like ‘childbirth’ and well, mainly childbirth, but [...]
There’s a fair bit in the (British, at least) news lately about sexual predators on Facebook (and the internet in general), following the sentencing of Peter Chapman for the rape and murder of a 17 year old. Most of the uproar is, as it usually is, about how we can protect ‘our’ children from this sort of thing [...]
(As I haven’t moved into a recently demilitarised zone, I’m talking here about save checkpoints in computer games, rather than the kind occupied by armed guards who ask to see your papers. Although I’m sure the latter are also quite annoying) Anyone who plays computer games regularly enough, badly enough, will be familiar with the checkpoint [...]
Original version posted on Bastardised.net, March 2007 That may not be a real word in the title, but it’s a bit hard to find a more usefully concise way of saying “adding a redundant numeral to things” (feel free to try in the comments, if you fail to appreciate my vocabularic genius here). There’s a worrying trend [...]
I know that many foreigners have been conditioned to think that Britons have a big ‘thing’ for tea, full of ritual and pomp. You see it cropping up on American programming in particular – any time a British character is involved (or god forbid, more than one), they’ll begin the ‘tea ritual’ at some point, [...]
