Category: Musings

  • I could have been a lexicologist

    I have enjoyed my teaching career but I might have also enjoyed other ways of earning a living. Careers advice at my school was abysmal. Nursing and the police force were represented I remember … and, well, very little else. I might have been happy working in publishing. I still don’t entirely understand all the […]

  • Fitzcarraldo

    This is not a name with which I was familiar until a couple of weeks ago. Since then I have read about it in several publications. Fitzcarraldo is the name of a small, independent publishing house that is creating a lot of surprise in the industry. Jacques Testard is the one with the vision and […]

  • Sitting or Sat?

    I remember listening in the staff room to somebody who said: ‘And there they were, all sat at their desks ready for the lesson.’  This sounded quite foreign to me and not something I would ever have said. My version would have replaced ‘sat’ with ‘sitting.’ ‘ He was sat at the front,’ sounds even […]

  • Books to read before you die

    Over a cup of coffee I rather randomly looked at lists of 50 or 100 books that one ought to read before the end is nigh. There are obviously many versions put out by different publishers etc but as you might expect there was a great deal of commonality. Pride and Prejudice was in every […]

  • Got

    I have a friend who despises the word ‘nice’ and strongly encouraged the children she taught not to use it. I quite like it actually. It makes me think of tea in thin china cups and pretty tablecloths. My personal bête noir is the word ‘got.’ I suspect this dislike comes from early primary school […]

  • Danielle Steele

    A Sunday Times article recently educated me about the author Danielle Steele, now in her mid seventies. She has sold over 800 million copies. I had to check that number, it is so enormous and she has written nearly 200 books, sometimes 3 or 4 a year. I have never read anything by her. Why, […]

  • Joy and Sadness – Conflicting Emotions

    The joy is that I came home to find a new book waiting for me: The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths. She is one of my favourite modern authors and she has her own shelf in one of my bookcases. The sadness is that I know this is the last book in the series about […]

  • Frank Muir

    If you are of a certain age then you might remember Frank Muir, he of a variety of Radio 4 quiz games and also Call My Bluff on BBC 2 with his fellow comedy writer Denis Norden. I bought a second hand copy of the Oxford book of Humorous Prose recently and found that it […]

  • Fake Books

    Is it OK to buy books simply because of the cover, or the colour, size or design? Bookstagram and Booktok  (and probably many other social media sites that I don’t know of) are proffering books as interior decoration. In a way this is nothing new as many people bought books by the yard in Georgian […]

  • Comparatives and Superlatives

    I wonder where you stand on this? I had been doing some proofreading and wanted the word ‘youngest’ changed to ‘younger.’ If you have 2 sons, then as far as I’m concerned, you have a younger son and an elder son. To use the word youngest or eldest you would need more than 2 sons!  […]