Shooting Parrots

No, this is not a diatribe about the south moaning about their ‘drought’ while it seems to have done nothing but rain here in the verdant north of England. It’s more to do with the way life’s hiccups seem to hit you all at one go. It started when I arranged to meet an old [...]

This is my contribution to ABC Wednesday and for Round Ten I am focusing on people from the past, some famous, others less so. Where would Las Vegas be without the fruit machine, the invention of car mechanic Charles Fey? Charles was born Augustus Fey in Vöhringen, Bavaria, in 1862, the youngest of sixteen children. [...]

They say there are three telltale signs of ageing: the first that you can no longer eat pizza after sundown, second that you invariably go ‘oof!’ every time you sit in an armchair. And I can’t remember what the third one is. It is those memory lapses that will do for me yet. I often [...]

The power of words is never more apparent than when someone is trying to make you worry about your health, whether it is justified or not. I was listening to an interview on Radio Five Live this morning about the scientists in Holland who are growing meat in the laboratory from stem cells and hope [...]

This is my contribution to ABC Wednesday and for Round Ten I am focusing on people from the past, some famous, others less so. If asked who became King of England after the Battle of Hastings, most people, me included, would say William the Conqueror, but in fact it was Edgar the Etheling (or Ætheling [...]

Isn’t it odd the way that blogger’s block can hit you out of the blue? One minute you’re all self-opinionated and the next there’s not a thought in your head, original or otherwise. I did start a few posts, but they didn’t really go anywhere. For example, I began writing about Abu Qatada and the [...]

I can’t think of a thing to write about at the moment, not that that has stopped me before, so I thought I’d simply publish this photo of our dog Jack. It’s one I took at Christmas as he chomped his way through one of his treats. The reason it has surfaced again now is [...]

This is my contribution to ABC Wednesday and for Round Ten I am focusing on people from the past, some famous, others less so. Dicky Doyle was a doctor who successfully treated a man who had been partially decapitated at the notorious Changi jail in Singapore during World Wat Two. Born in LIverpool in 1906, [...]

I am occasionally pulled up on the spelling errors and typos that crop up in Shooting Parrots and that is how it should be. If it wasn’t for the metaphorical blue pencil, where would the language be? And because I’m prone to a gaffe or two myself, I’m loath to point the grammatical finger, but [...]