Other Men's Flowers

These are suited to people with ragbag minds. Some of them are dreary, some obscure and some merely silly (I mean the questions, not the peo...

I consider myself fortunate to have failed dismally, twice, in my half-hearted attempt to get a degree in Mechanical Engineering, for I know...

It is difficult to list groups of unpleasant people in order of detestability, classifying them from the utterly wicked to the merely sleazy...

Tasting menus in restaurants, basically a lot of little bits of stuff served consecutively, apparently became increasingly popular during th...

No 34 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century    January 1934   From Louis Landsberg in Aachen: Thank ...

N.F. Simpson, who recently died aged 92, wrote a play called The One Way Pendulum ; I have treasured lines from it for years, including thes...

I have affectionate memories of Professor David Bellamy, OBE; he was always a bit of a clown, but his zest was endearing and his 400 TV prog...

I don't like poetry much but have always been a keen versifier. I set a couple of sonnet-writing competitions some years ago ( this is ...

Monday's Guardian had a thoughtful and fairly objective article by Sam Leith about the relative virtues of books and electronic books. M...

I have been taken to task by one of my nearest and dearest for having expressed mild irritation at the brouhaha over the English cricket t...

It has occurred to me that it is a long time since I have added a new titfer to my "Hats" category. This will be OMF's 50th ha...

They both have that piercing look of hard men, as if they might have had something in common, but they probably didn't, apart from havin...

I get a couple of dozen spam or scam messages every month in response to one of the eleven hundred posts this blog contains, sometimes one ...

In September 1938 my mother wrote to my sister  Audrey, who at that time was a dancer, on the stage in Scotland; she had her ninetieth birt...

So England’s cricketers “will take the pitch to a rousing rendering of Jerusalem ”. This will disappoint those who, in a poll carried out b...

It is axiomatic that musical jokes are never funny; this may be because great composers rarely had much fun. But great musicians sometimes d...

Emails from gentlemen offering me 10% of $3 million if I use my bank account to carry out a small service for them have not been reaching me...

It seems that most Canadians have taken the Cambridges to their hearts, and everyone knows what warm hearts Canadians have. Some Québécois d...

As always, the report on the latest quarterly update to the Oxford English Dictionary is a good read: For me, Tex-Mex food is ugh , but I ...

It does happen sometimes that dog-owners get to look like their dogs. I used to know a girl called Gill who kept a pair of Afghan hounds. As...