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The tragedy of drugs and the creative personality
A bloke I was chatting to at a house party last weekend, at which most of the guests were musicians, told me he used to be a prolific songwriter, but had barely written a word since giving up marijuana two years ago. His skill for creative expression had disappeared,...
My spelling goes from bad to wosre
It was embarrassing enough to spell embarrassing wrongly in the recent spelling test, but things took a turn for the worse when I had a request late in the afternoon to write a book review for the local paper (“any chance of it by tomorrow?”). I’d just finished...
And I thought I could spel!
Just took an online spelling test on www.peopleperhour.com. It’s one of various tests you can take to show your proficiency in various activities. The results then get posted on your profile to show how good (in theory!) you are at what you do. 40 spelling questions....
Toast and what to put on it – the truth about what men talk about
What started out as only an averagely tedious conversation about toast, prompted by Rory admitting he’d achieved nothing all day – apart from painting a bit of the ceiling and watching it dry - other than get up and eat breakfast, plumbed new depths of banality after...
Why a writer should never be her own sub-editor: going crazy over a conflict of interest
It’s unusual, to say the least, for one person to be both contributor and editor, at the same time, on the same publication. But I once found myself in the situation where I was both editing an industry yearbook (in my capacity as an editor for one company) and...
Rhubub, Shephards Pie and why journalists are rubbish at sums
Following my rant about the illiterate racist (see previous blog), I had a more gentle laugh at some comical mis-spellings I saw recently. A local farm shop is currently selling “rhubub” while a greasy-spoon café down the road has “Shepards Pie” among its gourmet...
Circumcision, mis-spellings and “imergrants” taking our jobs
Like most journalists, I love to see mis-spellings and grammatical aberrations in the public domain: it gives us the chance to get all high and mighty about the state of education today and use the immortal phrase “don't they teach them anything?” For this reason I've...
Is everyone training to change career?
I don’t know if it’s a sign of the economic times but suddenly everyone I know seems to be re-training. Steph has just graduated with an honours degree in art – after chucking in her job as a teaching assistant to go to uni in her 40s. Kim is about to give up a...
Me, myself and I – and the other ones – how I found I wasn’t unique
Got a cryptic message on LinkedIn today, from a bloke called Brian. “Hong Kong?” it asked, simply and enigmatically. The flippant thing to do, of course, would have been to reply, as Wikipedia would put it, “One of two special administrative regions of the People’s...
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