Other Men's Flowers

The mere wearing of a silly hat is not, in itself, funny: there must be some ancillary cause of mirth before we fall about laughing. When ou...

Cecil Frances Alexander (1818-1895) was the daughter of a major in the Royal Marines and wrote Hymns for Little Children , including All Th...

I was listening to the news with rather less than half an ear, in the way that we used to listen to announcements about new peace initiative...

You must imagine this spoken at a cocktail party in a gushing voice : Oh, you live in the North, do you? How super. What fun. You don’t by a...

Last week I published a pretty picture of a roast loin of pork. A friend who lives in Ireland commented that it looked like a diseased liver...

Unsolicited commercial email is what the manufacturers of canned spiced ham would like us to call it, but everyone has called it spam ever...

I imagined—and, indeed, asserted—that the title of my previous post was a good one for exciting readers’ interest, but of course in my innoc...

Good title, that, if a bit long. Arresting. Intriguing. Makes you want to read on to find out what it's all about. Last Friday I sent an...

Our Highway Code has a series of rather pretty illustrations of hand and light signals for drivers (I couldn't find any in the Straßen...

Several correspondents are awaiting replies to recent emails they have sent me. These are in the main messages raising complex issues and th...

A particularly offensive spamming trick is posting the same comment on a very large number of random blogs, the idea being that you can comp...

I have added one more to my list of film quotes which have given me pleasure. A few days before Christmas I was enjoying a lunchtime G&...

Last week our garden looked like this, for a very short period; a nice picture, but not really news. The seaside town where we live had the ...

A friend of ours named Ginette lived in France during World War II. We have known her for many years, but only recently heard the story of w...

Eighteen months ago The Weblog Review (now defunct) looked at Other Men's Flowers and made some comments. One of the reviewers, a writ...

Two years old today! It’s an exciting age: using new words all the time and sometimes getting them almost right, generally with a sunny disp...

When terseness is called for the French can be extremely, well, terse; there are examples HERE and HERE . But they can also express themsel...

There is a website devoted to the "Spenser" novels by the American author Robert B. Parker. Spenser is described as "the mos...

I am in general much less than fascinated by the world of nature and not an avid reader of Country Diaries and the like, but my interest was...

"Look, if it means having to wear this stupid hat then I say the hell with Christmas." And grandfathers don't have much choice...