Category: Musings

  • 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!  […]

  • Bloom’s Day

    Happy Bloom’s Day, 16th June. It might be fun to be in Dublin today, drinking Guinness and eating oysters as that seems to be the tradition. So all this is about the novel Ulysses written by James Joyce. I have only ever read the first part of this tome, similarly with ‘A portrait of the […]

  • Magical Realism

    I went to a good U3A literature session recently but probably even better was the chat on my journey home. The driver talked about the books of Elif Shafak with great interest and he used the term magical realism. It took me a moment to realise that he hadn’t made this up but that it […]