Well not quite naked but they are urinators but not urinators in the sense of micturation. This Japanese painting is of two female pearl divers.the expression urinator also refers to persons who dive, particularly in search of something.Isn't the English language...

Useful...

This the accompanying article to my contribution to this week’s edition of The Pod Delusion. Parts of it are based on a previous article, What is STV playing at? You can listen to the full podcast below. In a recent episode of The Pod Delusion, Mark Thompson spoke about the good old days when ITV was still a federation of regional television stations. He outlined how, in England and Wales over the past ten or fifteen years, ITV’s regional diversity has given way to a bland umbrella brand. But not all of the nooks on the ITV network have succumbed to the juggernaut. Four of the ITV regions are still independently owned, and three avoid using the ITV brand. In the Channel Islands, Channel Television still owns the franchise, even though it uses ITV1 branding. But in Northern...

and all that. But I can’t do it. I simply cannot stay away from ridiculous ‘news but not really news’ stories. I try. I do. And I yes know that it’s a complete waste of my (and ultimately your) precious time, paying any attention whatsoever to these dregs, but ... Oh Ok I admit it. I haven’t tried that hard. Here’s the ‘latest’. Office Jargon That Should Be ‘Parked Going Forward’: The two CC’s (credit crunch and current climate) Clocking real mileage (a really strong idea) A high altitude view (taking a step back) Get a helicopter view (by turning 360° then circling back to your colleagues) (again taking a step back) Reaching the blue ocean of success (reaching a goal) Picking the low-lying fruit (an oldie but back on the list this year ... meaning a...

The snow got to us this evening. I had a text message from my wife around 3.30 saying “there’s white stuff falling from the sky”. That was it. I said my goodbyes for the day at work and headed for home. Thankfully there was nothing around and I made it home in about 15 minutes. My dad and brother took almost four hours to get home and Daze took just over five. My father-in-law abandoned his car and walked the last 4 miles, giving a total of 5 hours to get home from Waterlooville to Fareham (about a 25 minute journey normally). My brother in law (as far as I know) is still (at 11.10pm) still stuck on the Motorway from Southampton, having left work around 5pm. Of course, I took the opportunity (once I had charged the camera batteries) to head out the front of my...

Sorry Will*!  I was (minor) updating the Fareham West Scouts’ website for the district this morning and realised that our neighbouring district wasn’t in our list of useful links. I couldn’t remember the web address for the Fareham East lot so went and Googled it. This was the result: *Will is the webmonkey for Fareham East, my opposite number.  He takes every opportunity he can to dig at me for having better Google ranking than him. HAHA!  The best district wins...

Anybody who follows (I don’t any more!) The X Factor will know that Simon Cowell has chosen Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ as the song that will be released by the winner of the popularity contest. It’s almost guaranteed that it will go to the UK’s number one slot in the chart. Such a classic song does not deserve such an anal raping. I am not alone in this opinion. There are at least two groups on Facebook (yes, I relented and reactivated my account. I am sorry for my weakness!) calling for anybody with taste to buy the original track (YouTube Link) and try and get it to number 1: Lets get Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin to XMAS Number 1 Instead Of X Factor The ANTI X-FACTOR CHRISTMAS NO.1 Group To help you help us achieve this here are...

As it seems to have become fashionable for a person to re-Tweet themselves (often only a day or two after the initial tweet – a symptom of the immediacy of Twitter, I don’t doubt), I thought I would reblog a couple of my favourite old posts from this blog. Having 5 years (including backed up, pre-WordPress content!) worth of posts, there are a few that I consider “gems”. This one was originally posted back in February of 2007 and was simply called “Floating An Air Biscuit“: Floating An Air Biscuit Last night I had a vindaloo. Today while I sat on the loo The curry, working it’s way through, I floated an air biscuit. The stench most horrid, my arse was torrid, I had to vacate the bathroom. The other men stared at me choking, unable to breathe. I...

  and it’s not FOOTPATH. Nor is it alleyway, byway, lane, passage, thoroughfare, track, trail or walkway. Nope. Little did I know that this neighbourhood shortcut (that I use almost daily, though rarely after dark ... too spooky!) is in fact a TWITTEN ! Twitten is an old dialect word, used in both East and West Sussex for a path or alleyway. It is still in common use. The word is also in common use in the London residential area known as Hampstead Garden Suburb ... Elsewhere in the country, such alleyways are termed twitchells (north-west Essex, east Hertfordshire and Nottingham), chares (north-east England), ginnels (northern England), opes (Plymouth), jiggers (Liverpool), gitties (Derbyshire and Leicestershire) and snickelways (York) ... source Wikipedia. TWITTEN ! I love...

My son came out with a new one last night. 'Chillaxing' need I give an explanation? Comments...

I realised, this morning, that I had ignored the blog for over a month. It only came to my attention because the hosting was due for payment (another $50 that I can’t really afford!) and I finally had time to pay it this morning. I have been in two minds whether to bother with the blogs, I update them so irregularly that I didn’t know if it was worth it. Especially as (I think Pete mentioned this too) I use Twitter to say most things I need to. I decided, eventually, that I really don’t want to lose over five years’ worth of posts and history. It might not mean much to others, but it means a hell of a time investment to me and I still enjoy looking back at stuff I wrote all that time ago. Does anyone else go and look at my archive? I don’t know. I am...

Language evolves all the time. Some words ‘die-out’ while new ones are invented. Or existing words take on new meanings. Some words (or phrases) become ‘fashionable’. But being ‘fashionable’ does not make them ‘likeable’ A recent poll asked folks to list the words or phrases they found most irritating. Topping the list was - ‘whatever‘, voted most annoying by 47% of pollsters followed by “you know,” (25%) “anyway” (at 7 percent), “it is what it is” (11 percent) “at the end of the day” (2 percent) Source . . . One of my pet hates is people saying “at this moment in time” instead of “now” . Ggrrr !!! Do you have any words or phrases that drive you up the...

I told you the stories you wanted to hear, and now here you are in this warm bed with the sheets thrown back, lying on my chest listening to the beat of my heart. It seems so real to you. I am here and solid, a real living person. However, only I, of the two of us, know that none of those stories I told you to lure you here are true. Stories are like that, lures to entice, a way of spreading out the enticements along a trail of words to tempt you down that path and then up those stairs to this bed. I leave the words out there, scattered around the paths, waiting for someone like you to stumble across them as you become lost in these great woods searching for something that will lead you down a safe path. These words scattered across your path seem to promise so much, point the way...

This is the sort of stuff I was talking about the other week! Of course, who do we have to thank for it, but Dr Johnson. In fact, the Beinecke Library at Yale is posting up a word a day from the Dictionary for the whole of 2009. Now, I’m not saying the Dictionary doesn’t have plenty of long Latinate words in it; but anybody who knows their word roots can out two bits together and make a rather official-sounding compound. When I issued my original appeal I specifically meant good old colourful English words we’d hate to see drop away completely. Words like: Pickapack, pickthank, pignut, pigsney. Jack Pudding, jadish, finglefangle. Demure (as a verb), denizen (as a verb), peach (as a verb), peal (as a verb). Fripperer....

If I Show You A Flower "If I take your hand, and lead you away from here," she said, looking up at his face. "If we walk together through shady, sun-dappled places, talking easily of things that matter to us, will you come willingly?" "I think I will have to," Mike said. Rosemary nodded once, as a smile flickered for a moment on her lips. She reached out for Mike's hand. He looked at her as his hand moved, seemingly of its own accord, towards hers. She was smaller than he was; about five foot-eight, he guessed. Her hair was all the colours of autumn leaves, golden where the sun caught it, fading to a deep dark rusty brown in the tangle of thick curls around her neck and shoulders. She wore a short, black velvet jacket over a black scoop-necked...

Sedulously eschew obfuscatory hyper verbosity and prolixity.Use tasteful words. You may have to eat them later.There are more than 200,000 useless words in the English language and at some committee meetings you hear all of them!The mind of fools is in their mouth, but the mouth of wise men is in their mind. Sirach 21:26We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them. - Abigail Adams (1744-1818) Letter to John Adams, 1774If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.ADAMS, DOUGLAS (1952-2001) {Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective AgencyNo man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is...

The words will grow again, one day, from the seeds planted here. It will take time for these words to grow. Some words grow like weeds around us, scattered here and scattered there by those who do not know how to tend for them. They grow haphazard around us, choking every other word’s meaning, and stunting each other’s growth. Sometimes it is hard to find the way through the tangled mass of words run wild, hard to find our way into the clearing of meaning. The place where the word paragraphs soar high into the sky, seeking the sun of understanding, almost high enough to touch the clouds, sheltering us and giving us the shade of contemplation under their spreading leaves. [See here for an explanation of these posts labelled as Fragments]...

link | Comments (0) | words...

Breathe a Name The world becomes familiar an inventory of possibilities hovers near your open lips. You take each delicate moment into cupped hands to breathe a name over what you can hold. Just one word and all this becomes real enough for you to walk through. As if this is the only world and the rest are mere dreams made for lonely nights....

Sometimes it seems the words hide there, waiting for us to come out to find them. The world waits too, behind the words, ready for us to use those words to describe it. It waits there for us to make up stories about it, fitting the words together around the world, making a chain of words to link us to the ground we walk upon. We call those chains stories and some of them are true and some of them are not, but we have a tendency to believe stories as if they are true, as if despite what we see they do describe a world around us. The closer we look at the world the more we should see that those ancient stories do not describe the world we live in. That does not matter, though, as long as we know those stories are just stories and no longer are about the world we live in. The danger of...

Here’s a cute idea. Go on a website, adopt a word, and undertake to use it as much as possible in your dealings with the world. The people behind Save the Words have quite rightly identified a creeping rot around the edges of the English vocabulary, and have set up this website to help ordinary concerned citizens do something about it.The website consists of a page with a jumble of long and abstruse words on it, and a window into which they come. Once the word of your choice is within the parameters of  the window, you can click on it adn adopt it for your own. Try it: but beware! These words speak. They all clamour to be chosen. You may have to turn your sound down. (Srsly.) I adopted a word – agonyclite, which is a member of an ascetic sect that isn’t, if I...

Spaces I dream of narrow spaces between stars and vast unspanable distances between blades of grass. The distance between words and the soft touch of hands on naked skin. Words that say nothing and the eloquence of gentle silence. The precise speech of a fingertip bringing into being a whole universe with the force of a single touch....

We have held the shapes of our lonely days in our hands for far too long, and now we walk away together from all the things we need to leave behind. Those memories of all the lonely days tumble around you as we walk away from our pasts, and there seems no route you can trace on all the maps of your few small remaining dreams that will take you to anywhere but here and now. The path winds slowly across the very edge of these cliffs, leaving the sea murmuring to itself far below. Up here, the cries of the gulls are louder as they wheel into the sky. The beach below is crowded under the sun, the breeze occasionally throwing the sounds of holiday at us. But we are alone up here and you have that look that knows it. We both know what will happen next, even as your clothes pool all...

The latest version of the Collins English dictionary contains over 250 new words, many of which have microblogging website Twitter to thank for their reintroduction to common usage. With the rise of the social blogging revolution, various expressions previously unique to speech, such as heh, hmm and meh are becoming increasingly popular in written language. Additionally, archaic phrases such as ‘hey ho’ or ‘heigh ho’ — an expression for surprise or disappointment, amongst other things — have been re-invigorated thanks thanks to their use on the social networking website....

This becomes a distance that holds us apart, as though we are on the opposite banks of a raging river: unable to cross, unable to meet, unable to touch. We talk only of distances and the spaces between as though the words themselves can no longer cross these gaps. Distance becomes like the distance between stars, unimaginably far and empty of everything, where all is silence and the words do not even escape our lips. I talk of times long gone now, as though the past becomes more real the further away it gets. There was a time when I thought of what the future would bring, but now I think only of what was lost in the past. Here and now seems no more real than it ever has. Just a passing moment that is gone before the hand can close around it. The hand encloses only empty air; the...

[Young Girl Reading - Jean-Honore Fragonard] Here is the place to begin. We tip these words out across the page, hoping they will land where we can make shapes of meaning from them, from where they heap and fall. We have given names to all the things that make the world around us; and now we must tell the stories each one of them holds within itself. Everything has a word to name it, and every word has a story to tell about itself. We are here to listen to the stories this world tells about itself. We, too, have names and those names each have their own stories too. The more we learn, the more we understand, can all help make each story truer. Those tales of monsters, of demons, devils and gods belong to another age now. We have stepped out, beyond those stories, to find what is true;...

After a week of George Osborne attempting to claim the mantle of “progress” whilst defending the NHS, and an organisation called “Progressive Vision” calling for the NHS to be scrapped, PoliticsHome have published a poll which suggests that a) A third of people think that no political party is ‘progressive’ and that Labour is less progressive than the Tories, Lib Dems and the Greens; and that b) most people think that ‘progress’ means ‘reforming’ and ‘modernising.’ I’m sure that what PoliticsHome would like us to infer from these findings is that Labour is a busted flush, and it is hard to deny that it suggests that. But it also suggests something else: the word ‘progress’ has come to mean nothing...

By  the way. Look at those absolutely gorgeous letters in the headline. They look as if they’re made of chrome. The other week Roddy Lumsden posed a question on the poets’ forum I sometimes frequent. He asked: “would you write a poem for a baked bean TV advert for £1500?” Needless to say, most of the comments ran along the lines of “I’d write a poem for a tin of baked beans.” The first one, which did make me smile (it wasn’t me, by the way) (thanks Rik), went: “C’mon. I wrote a double dactyl and entered it into a competition to win a free colonoscopy. Didn’t win.” The chat turned a little more serious, revolving around the problems of writing to commission, what is The Muse, and what’s a fair price. In the...

Well, it’s the last day of a fortnight’s leave from work. I have achieved very little I wanted to and a few things have happened that were inevitable but not great. So, what do I do with my last day? These are my options: 1. Geocaching 2. Go back to bed. 3. Take that engine out of Homer so I can move the shell on. Nope, I think I’ll go have a tooth extracted instead. Good times…. Oh well, I have an appointment to see a regular dentist on 15 September and I should (with a bit of luck) have new teeth by Christmas… Related Posts:Five Things You Don't Know About MeMerry Christmas!In The Chair And Have...

ideal for those facing the cane at school link | Comments (0) | words...

Yes, he read it all right. He looked at me as if I had a swollen cheek, looked sidelong into the corner, and even tittered in embarrassment. He crumpled the manuscript needlessly and grunted. The questions he asked seemed crazy to me. Saying nothing about the essence of the novel, he asked me who I was, where I came from, and how long I had been writing, and why no one had heard of me before, and even asked what in my opinion was a totally idiotic question: who had given me the idea of writing a novel on such a strange theme? Finally I got sick of him and asked directly whether he would publish the novel or not. Here he started squirming, mumbled something, and declared that he could not decide the question on his own, that other members of the editorial board had to acquaint themselves...

There is a place that hides all of you inside yourself. A place no-one else can even know the name of. It is a place of beginnings that never fall into endings. A place where nothing fades into indifference and hollowness. You have held the shape of this place between cupped hands, shaping it into the ball of possibility that you have thrown off into the future. Now, here you stand longing to get back to that place. The maps of your longing can no longer lead you down the path, past the entangling thorns, to the secret entrance that leads to your place. No longer do you have the key that will unlock that door. You have left it alone too long. A route that was once etched on your heart, carved into your soul, but no longer can you recall it. Even our dreams get tired with misuse and...

And even now the sky and seasons fill the days with life and light, while we go on down these roads towards the sea. But I do not know, not any more. I have seen the days come, and the days have gone, not leaving any trace on our lives. Sometimes, it seems we haunt this world like ghosts, ethereal, un-solid and hardly there at all. Sometimes, it seems I have had dreams far more real than this, I have woken displaced in the night, searching for a way back to that better world that slipped away into the shadows, away from me. I have searched hard for that road that will lead me back to that place I glimpsed for a few moments deep within the deeper depths of my mind. All that is so far away, though, too far away and out of reach. I have only this world to walk through, but it is just...

[Edward John Poynter - Erato, Muse of Poetry] The Bride She was there and dressed in white I thought, for a time, she could be a bride, my bride. But she is not there for weddings she is no-one's bride. She will not be tamed. She is not there for easy domesticity. She will not always be there like the morning to turn her face towards you on some warm pillow. She moves over landscapes and through forests along shorelines and across cliff tops, always just out of reach, always beyond your calling. She moves like a cloud across the skies of your life. Beyond touch, she waits for the world to move around her. She was there before history began: before kings, kingdoms, deeds, heroes and legends, myths and long-faded memory....

Things are changing, but then they always do. Nothing ever stays the same; you cannot step into the same river twice. Everything changes from moment to moment; both you and the river have changed. Even if you only stepped into it a second or so before, the river and you will have been changed by that event so that neither of you is the same as before. [Nude Woman Stepping Off Rocks Into Pool Of Water Johann Friedrich Waldeck (1766-1875 German) Newberry Library, Chicago] Even the smallest action – or inaction – can have the broadest unforeseen consequences. The smallest pebble dropped into the river leaves ripples undulating out from the point where it hit the water. Every breath you take and every touch of your finger on naked skin can change the world in some way, has already...

Here it begins, where it is new. We have not seen this day before, even though we have lived through so many years together. The rain will fall. The rain always falls these days. We seem to have lost the knack of summer. The grass will be wet where we lie, and be cold against bare skin. But it is important to touch the earth with nothing between us and it, to feel the weight of the world pressing back against you as we lie side by side and look up to see the clouds brooding together over us. We come here when we feel a need to get close to something real, when our lives become little more than distance and horizons. We want to become something that lives in contact with life itself and feel how it feels to grow and become. This place exists on the edge of our lives, a place of...

kezia and i have agreed to up our usage of the word ample.  we're not using it ample enough already. link | Comments (0) | words...

I have a new short story Closing Down up at ABCtales. Not only has it been ‘Cherry-Picked’ there, it is also their ‘Story of the Week.’ Naturally, I am rather thrilled by this....