It’s funny how little links grow into a chain. A couple of days ago I was reading a post on Paul Butzi's blog in which he quoted a stanza from his favourite poem, Robert Frost’s Two Tramps in Mud Time. I know very little about poetry; I don’t even know what I like. But the piece was enough to se...

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This post is number 38 in a series.

I had seen one or two, but that’s no summer. This evening on the terrace, fresh from sticking stolen Bruggmansia cuttings in some soil, I sat back and watched a dozen or more swallows shrieking as they hawked beneath a mottled blue-gray sky. It’s odd how the...

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This post is number XX in a series.

I didn’t think I would be, but I’m really rather peeved by the way my WordPress update worked out. And not just WordPress. There seems to be an obsession with making things more complicated -- possibly just for the sake of it -- rather than with making them wo...

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So the apostrophe — that key orthographic distinguisher that protects Western civilization from confusion between the genitive case of the 3rd person singular neuter pronoun and the result of attaching the clitic form of the 3rd person singular present tense form of the copula to that pronoun — is...

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This post is number 36 in a series.

Wild social whirl. Home after midnight. Post thought but unwritten, and rules allow skippage, so ...

Monday last, the Italians elect Silvio for a third-term, definitely the triumph of hope over experience. And I sit on the station platform for almost an hour...

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