As a famous manager once famously noted after a famously narrow squeak: football, bloody hell. Whatever we might think about footie, it does sometimes manage to transcend its apparent role as the circus part of bread and circuses and resolves itself into theatre and occasionally, beyond that into pure drama. Many football fans will have thought at one time or another that their team will be the death of them. This is certainly true of England. And yet, we are all…
Language. Huh. What is it good for? Why bother? I may as well post a blank page with no title and leave you to make up your own blog. Communication without prejudice. But words, sentences, meaning? Just a swirling magma of unanchored signifiers, an unasked-for dish of congealed opinions that serve to confuse as much as clarify. So what’s the point of this blog then, you may well ask. I do. Some years ago there was serious concern in certain linguistic quarters about…
Having stretched everyone and everything out of any recognisable shape, the interminable UK lockdown is letting us out to play again. Kind of. We step gingerly into the spring sunlight blinking like participants released from a Deep Time experiment that has gone horribly wrong. Whereas the volunteers in the French 40-day study were deprived of all news during their spell in a cave, here the general populace has been force-fed little else for over a year now. And what a tasteless, unsavoury…