AS a person of interest, Meaghan Markle usually rates way down the list of those spotlighted celebrities who engage my attention. Almost off the scale; at the lowest end. As I feel she is considered by most people apart from those sad sacks to whom all gossip is more precious than oxygen; the mainstay of their existence. The Duchess of Excess Sussex is my Marmite. Take it or leave it. In my case, one finger dipped into a dab of the ghastly stuff was enough for a lifetime’s abstinence. Flashed into my awareness, registered high on the avoidance scale and… Continue reading
Words
Living, coping and observing in the age of Covid #8
Feb 2021: THE Pisa-like bedside tower of books looked like toppling before I got around to recording some of its content. It was only thanks to some extended sessions of lockdown reading that it has been whittled down… Continue readingReceive my ‘Read. Write. Run. Repeat.’ newsletter
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THE prime reason we write is to communicate with others. This applies whether it be with one other person or with the masses devouring the latest scandal or disaster. Nowhere is this more true than in the print media. Newspapers need to be quickly and clearly understood by the widest… Continue reading
Seems that stream of consciousness is still in use: THE following apologies for sentences are all complete and direct quotes from one who should know better. What happened to leading by example? “If there is an unfairness there is nothing that I will do in order to address that unfairness.”… Continue reading
OUR libraries and bookshops offer an intriguing double-whammy for devotees of crime fiction. They can either select a mystery by the enduring and much revered Josephine Tey, or they can delve into a tale of much more recent vintage in which the same Josephine Tey is the solver of… Continue reading
The lexicographers are working overtime. New words are being coined, reviewed and added to dictionaries worldwide almost daily. It seems there’s nothing like disasters and pandemics to send the spin doctors into a frenzy of creativity as they try to find ways of cloaking and minimising what is actually happening. Plain speaking is avoided at all costs – brushed roughly aside as obfuscation takes its place. It is an ignoble artform long practised by bureaucrats, politicians, the corporates and all who feel unable to call a spade a tool for digging dirt, or for shovelling it to one side. And… Continue reading