Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category
“Are you there Moriarty?”
August 30th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
In both the novel and the film “One Day” [see my reviews here], there is a scene where middle-class English characters play a parlour game called “Are you there Moriarty?” I had never heard of it before. Have you?
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New views of St Paul’s Cathedral
August 25th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
Today I had a business lunch with a BT colleague at a restaurant close to the company’s headquarters in Paternoster Square which is next to St Paul’s Cathedral. I took the opportunity afterwards to call into the new shopping centre One New Change. I confess that I was less interested in the shops than in […]
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Ever seen locks of love?
August 24th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
“By mid afternoon, it was raining but – like the true Brits that they are – Roger & Silvia had umbrellas and kept going, determined to see as much as possible of the city. We left the Old Town and wandered around a park centred on the City Canal. The iron bridges over the canal […]
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Would contact with extraterrestrials benefit or harm humanity?
August 19th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
As we approach the weekend, when you will have time to ponder on all the troubles facing the world at present, you might want to add this question to your list of concerns. You will, no doubt, be reassured to know that the issue is the subject of a new report from Shawn Domagal-Goldman of […]
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The letter you never want to write
August 6th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
In the Family supplement of today’s “Guardian”, there is this letter to “my husband, soon to be a widower”: “Well, my darling man, last Thursday we heard the news. The haematologist looked so stricken when he gave us the six-month deadline that neither of us felt we could react or cry then and there, for […]
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Would you like a house with 27 bathrooms?
July 17th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
Vee is fascinated by property television programmes and property web sites and she has today drawn my attention to this particular house. Apparently the place has become notorious because it is priced at £70 million and has been on the market for seven years. As a result, it features in this article in today’s “Observer”. […]
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Which American politician said this? (1)
July 17th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
“There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be […]
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The irritation of travel announcements
June 27th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve travelled to Oxford, Bristol, Manchester and Derbyshire – all by train. So I have considerable sympathy with David Marsh who explains in this article his objections to the strange language used in rail announcements. It’s not only the words that are used for travel announcements; it’s also the […]
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Where do four states or four countries meet?
June 25th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
I recently read about a location in the United States called Four Corners Monument. This is the only place in the United States where four states intersect at one point: Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. It’s very remote and I’m not planning to visit it. There’s another spot on the globe where the boundaries […]
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Why is it called bubble and squeak?
June 20th, 2011 by Roger Darlington
Last night, Vee and I took a young Czech woman out to dinner on Harrow-on-the-Hill. She was keen to be introduced to typically English food so we identified for her suitable items on the menu. In the end, she chose roast beef and Yorkshire pudding followed by bread and butter pudding. But she was fascinated […]
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