Other Men's Flowers

I know it’s lazy to publish a post containing a link to an item in a newspaper without any comment. However, I was much taken with a report ...

“Her English is too good,” he said, “that clearly indicates that she is foreign For whereas other girls are taught their native language, En...

It wasn’t my fault, no-one was hurt, and absolutely everyone involved, especially me, acted with commendable calm and forbearance. Even the...

Football has been driven from everyone’s mind by an announcement from Luxembourg stating that the board of the pan-European steel group Arce...

I normally take the feeds from around twenty websites or blogs, though I look at the updates only occasionally, in idle moments. I was depre...

We live near the centre of a town far from the noise of tractors and the stench of broiler chicken houses; our road is quiet and we have man...

The other day an internet friend in Wisconsin kindly sent me a copy of a book with this title. It is a fascinating and exhaustive treatise a...

The OED gives as alternative spellings: hullo, hallo, halloo, halloa and others (some used only as verbs) and a rather perfunctory etymology...

No, nothing to do with hormones; as Damon Runyon would say, that is not such a topic as I am wishing to give the large hallo to. It is evide...

O Sole Mio is a nice old song if you like that sort of thing, and it is a great pity that a generation has grown up all over the world whic...

I had always assumed that the chant often used as a prelude or accompaniment to mindless violence was derived from this lovely old hymn, bu...

...is not easy to find in the dross of Other Men’s Flowers , even though it now contains 430 posts amounting to 100,000 words. Blogger provi...

A couple of years ago I imposed upon myself the obligation of making a new post to Other Men's Flowers every second day. I have not fou...

The top five baby names for 2005 in the UK were Jessica, Emily, Sophie, Olivia and Chloe for girls, and Jack, Joshua, Thomas, James and Oli...

Some of James Thurber’s cartoons don’t actually need the drawing: the caption on its own tells the story. Examples are: “Well, if I called t...

Some quite literate people often get this wrong: Loathe, v.t . detest, regard with disgust [OE lathian] Example: I really loathe him and ...

I never had any desire to read The Da Vinci Code but I did think I might go and see the film when it came out. Now that it has, I am not su...

Casual acquaintances of mine may be surprised to hear that I have been glancing at episodes of the current series of Big Brother . For those...

It seems that Euan Blair's internship in Washington didn't work out too well. I read that “he decided to leave the office of his se...

What do the following have in common? A revolutionary design for affordable houses, a cerise-coloured back-pack, the music of Chopin, a dual...