Other Men's Flowers

Here’s another bore, quite unforgettable although it’s many years since I met him. We didn’t have gap years in those days, but there was a...

Leaving the theme of boredom for the moment - no, hang on, continuing with the same theme – The Chelsea Flower Show is about to open. I have...

Following the previous post, I shall stay on the theme of boredom for a while; I have at least two more Grade A bores to write about, both o...

Major league bores are of many kinds, but the commonest variety have one characteristic: everything they say, but everything, is either a st...

A year ago I commented on the fact that the French, pauvres types , seem to have only one limerick , and no-one wrote to tell me of another....

"Unlike most toads, wealth toad has three limbs and a pair of red fiery eyes and is commonly seen offering an ancient Chinese coin in i...

Every so often a news story appears which confirms one's belief in the infinite richness and variety - and, ultimately, the inexplicabil...

This is a serious post, unlike nearly all the other 236 in this blog. I have been diligently scribbling for more than sixty years. I enjoyed...

Well, not quite the nation: one in five of the population voted to return New Labour to power, with the lowest share of the vote ever taken ...

Since throdkins first appeared on the internet on April 27th , there has been worldwide interest in this unattractive-sounding dish (oatmeal...

I remember a moment of joy on a bad day at the office some years ago when I discovered by accident that these words made an anagram of the n...

The great advantage of meeting new people on the net as opposed to meeting them in person is that you have total control over the relationsh...

No-one deplores more than I the use of strong language on the net, particularly in those boring simple-minded polemics which are called rant...

The excitement generated in us by what comes through our letterbox has reached an all-time low this week. In addition to the usual junk mail...

I have already given an example of the economical way in which the French use their beautiful language, and from what I heard on the news y...

Google, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, MSN and Yahoo cannot find this word, so it is safe to assume that the internet has no references to it; ther...

Until recently I had seen this word only on the internet and never in print, Since it seemed to be usually associated with lists of fatuous ...

A friend of mine has told me that a girl he knows downloaded a photo of papal robes, and put them on eBay: Still Warm! Used (but immaculate)...

The phrase "a rchetypal British [they mean English, surely?] gentleman " is being trotted out in many of the reports of the death...

My second example of a person who spent a lifetime doing something very badly and became much admired and even loved for it is Madame Floren...