This year’s most annoying phrase has to be ‘going forward’. I listen to the Today programme every morning and almost without fail, some politician or other will say something like “Of course, going forward what we shall do is…”. In my day, time only ever went forward, so the phrase was never required, but there […]
It’s been a rather difficult year for me, because as some of you will know, I lost my Mum in early autumn. She had been getting progressively more poorly since she turned 80 last year, but in the spring she suffered a stroke which set her back significantly and appeared to take away her formerly […]
It’s turned December, it’s raining and I’ve a couple of hours to wait before I can put the final coat of paint on the wall I’ve just decorated, so this is an ideal time to look back on the year and think about what you, the reader, might find interesting amongst the cliché-ridden self-referential balderdash […]
Thursday 9th November 2006 I was taking a party of about 30 people on a Ghost Tour when several events occurred which ostensibly appear fairly innocuous, but when coupled with reports from other people who were also there begin to appear quite extraordinary. I shall initially relate the facts and no more, and afterwards I […]
I find myself once more sat at the PC wondering how best to keep in touch with distant friends accumulated over the years in a way that is more than just a scrawled signature on a card. (You’ve got that anyway!) So it’s back to the old newsletter to give you a flavour of what […]
For a while I have liked the saying “Every young person is just an older person waiting to happen”. Well, this year, a TV series featuring a number of men of a certain age grumbling about modern society made me wonder whether the older person in me is making an appearance. Very worryingly, I found […]
As someone once said, time is that quality of nature which keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn’t seem to be working. Life at Smithy Close has been running at a frenetic pace recently and there have been too few spare minutes grouped together to review the year, but I’ve done it […]
My main memory when looking back over the past year was during the summer months when for a few weeks our world was turned on end. It began at the start of the summer holidays when Laurie caught a sickness bug, which he kindly shared with everyone in the house. We were all better within […]