Other Men's Flowers

While carrying out intensive research (i.e. wandering around the net) for the post on Endtimers , I came across a report dated March 4th thi...

Whether the French are any good at food nowadays is arguable but it is certainly true that they are still much better at naming it than the ...

I have a friend called T D Ranga Ramanujan (or I used to have: I lost contact with him some years ago). It's not an uncommon name in Ind...

Really Magazine , that splendid repository of significant, surprising, extraordinary or merely amusing news items, has brought to the attent...

Here are three things often mentioned in conversation: a profound belief in them is widespread. Two of them certainly don’t exist and one se...

I write this piece for my sister , who is probably quite fond of me really but, like some others, believes that I am a carping, intolerant o...

Many of the posts in Other Men's Flowers might well give offence to someone; indeed, a few are actually intended to do just that. Nevert...

I have already written about two people who became famous by virtue of their total lack of talent, or even competence, in their respective f...

The recent weather conditions in the south of England have apparently been good for spiders and they are around in force. I am no arachnopho...

Watching recently a sober and well researched documentary about modern fundamentalists of various kinds, it struck me how devil-worshippers ...

Last week’s bright spot was the news that officials hoping to attract tourists to Jerusalem had distributed tens of thousands of leaflets pr...

Only those who know the difference between Ruy Lopez and Jennifer will be following closely the news from Kalmykia this week. In Elista, a ...

Yesterday I switched on the BBC one o'clock news while I was eating my lunch and heard "....the Prime Minister has confessed that h...

According to an absolutely serious, even po-faced, report in the Sunday Times yesterday: BAE Systems, one of the world’s biggest arms manufa...

Looking in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for something on the great explorer Wilfred Thesiger I drew a blank and was disappo...

Last year I wrote a post about meeting people on the net and mentioned the advantages of making friends that way. I have since discovered ...

His own mother called him the Great Beast and he rather enjoyed being described as the wickedest man in the world. This of course was an exa...

When politicians lay down their heavy burden they often say that this will enable them to spend more time with their family. It is not only ...

Here is an account of an incident. It is not very interesting but reading what the outcome was may be helpful to anyone who is involved in a...

…or take a dekko [n. vagrant’s slang, ex Romany dik =to look. In army, common since ca.1890, via Hindustani] …or have a shufty [n. or v. RAF...