I must confess that I’m a total killjoy about April Fool’s day. I’m haunted by the memory of one of my primary teachers sending a hapless boy down the corridor to ask another teacher for a ‘long stand’; and I still go red remembering being jeered at in the playground for falling for something foolish. But of course I see the point of it all. It’s one of the few non-religious festivals that seems to crop up all over Europe and beyond, so today we join many other countries around the world in pranking our friends and neighbours. Dennis the Menace is Scotland’s Patron Saint of pranking, and he’d be in his element today. Read More
Can you make a narrative out of a scrabble game, or a poem? Here is our recent game (I won!):
The neon drogue hay-bombed ski queens’ gay traverse. Rain-hid sin reef! Gay fox, plod-paid. Give one kid an ewer brew. No tar-roast date, catchy oboe tape. Guilt!
Gerard Manley Hopkins eat your heart out…
This week I have been mainly looking up. My favourite thing is to sit above the driver’s seat on the top of the Number 19 bus and admire the eyebrows of London. This morning I got interested in weathervanes. Arriving by bus at the British Library I passed flocks of them, on top of King’s Cross and St Pancras, atop a variety of steeples, and bedecking many a passing parapet. How fabulous. In 2007, why on earth do we need to know so constantly which way the wind is blowing? Read More
