Soon it will be time for the Oxford English Dictionary to choose its word or phrase of the year and I’ve been wondering which one they’ll select for 2020. This alarming and baffling year has not only seen the creation of lots of new words, but also old words being used in new ways. Upcycled,…
Permanently on the back burner
There are many things I imagine I’d like to do and might perhaps do some day, but just not yet. I’m waiting until the time is right. I’m not talking about those pesky jobs that feature on a to-do list, but about full-blown projects requiring a significant commitment of time, energy and imagination. I’m wondering…
September – free food for the taking
April might be the cruellest month, according to T S Eliot, but I would nominate September as the most demanding. All that mellow fruitfulness is wearing me out. It’s a joy to see the trees laden with fruit and the hedgerows bursting with blackberries and sloes, but I know that it will translate into hours…
Extreme dining
Yesterday I had lunch in an igloo. That’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d write. I dislike extreme cold intensely, probably because I grew up in Ottawa, Canada’s frozen capital. I wish they’d had an alternative, tropical capital I could have moved to, but they didn’t seem to have one on offer. Ottawa winters…
The irresistible lure of nostalgia
It’s a strange quirk of human nature that some of us are looking back on those lockdown weeks with a certain nostalgia. Of course for many it was a terrible time, but for others it’s now perceived as a period of enforced calm and blissful peace in which nothing was expected from them except to…
Drowning in a sea of photos
The great clear-out continues and I have reached the most feared job of all – sorting out years of photos. The actual physical ones I mean, and there must be thousands of the things. Some in piles, some in albums, some black and white blurred images, some large formal portraits. How many photos does a…
The joy of quitting or, better still, not even starting
I am one of those people who feels a compulsion to finish everything I start. Books once begun cannot be abandoned after 50 pages, no matter how dull. My plate must be cleared before I get up from the table. Every online course joined in a fit of enthusiasm must be seen through to the…
Godwottery
Recently my mother and I were chatting on the phone and realised that we were both admiring the butterflies on the buddleia bushes in our own gardens. Up to this point it had been a normal conversation, but then she suddenly exclaimed, “A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot.” “God what?” I said, “I…
Bringing eccentricity home
I recently read that more than half of Britons claim to belong to a subculture. This sounded fascinating and I was imagining all sorts of seemingly conventional people who quietly indulge in obscure hobbies like mountaintop poetry reading, traffic-cone collecting or extreme ironing. I should have stopped reading there, but instead I continued and learned…
The Yoga Challenge of Last Resort
There are those among us who are starting to panic – lockdown is easing and what do we have to show for it? Those Spanish conversation podcasts have been cast aside in favour of the BBC’s Friday Night Comedy and Fortunately with Fi and Jane. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress sits, neglected and dusty, in the…