Over the tannoy in a supermarket yesterday:“Can a member of price integrity go to aisle 24, please? Customer waiting.” Price Integrity? Do you think there’s a Price Integrity team? Do they have team meetings where they pledge to uphold price integrity against all threats? Do they finish with a group hug and a rousing chorus… Continue reading An announcement
A colleague (thanks Anthony!) drew my attention to this rant from Susan Hill. It’s not the first time she has expressed her views on this topic, and doubtless won’t be the last as long as GCSE and A level students see the reading of books as a chore to be got through as painlessly as… Continue reading Reading as a chore
On the train to Stafford yesterday, the announcement for each stop went:“We will shortly be arriving at Stoke. Stoke is the next stopping station on this service today”How is this better than “The next stop is Stoke”?
On the train to York yesterday, I was startled by an announcement: “The Pennine Host will shortly be passing through the train.” I had a vision of some grizzled warriors dressed in sheepskins, rampaging through the ranks of commuters prior to a spot of ritual boat (or train) burning. Turns out it was a bloke… Continue reading The Pennine Host
. ..and no, I don’t mean I tool along with War and Peace propped open on the dashboard. What strikes me as I make my journey to work, largely on motorways these days, is how vans and trucks have become mobile advertising hoardings, with a sprinkling of mission statement thrown in.Years ago, if you were… Continue reading My Motorway Reading
This novel was sent to me by Penguin, so that I could add a review to their Blog a Holiday Read site, where, apparently, it will appear sometime. You, discerning reader, can read about it now though. Many things are coming to an end at the faux-bohemian College Sunrise: not just the education of a… Continue reading Muriel Spark, The Finishing School
This is not the sort of book I would usually read, but since I was going to be in Tuscany for seven days, I thought it seemed an appropriate travelling companion. Evidently, it’s a sequel to her A Thousand Days in Venice, and there are other volumes on Umbria and Sicily- so you can see… Continue reading A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena de Blasi
The Guardian has a feature where readers say how wonderful the paper is. It’s usually either someone who has read the paper man and boy for fifty years, or some youngster who says how he picked up a copy in an idle moment, and abandoned the Daily Telegraph, or the Neasden Gazette, or whatever, on… Continue reading Gruaniad in shock horror
To Aarhus for the 9th international ESSE conference.’Er indoors accompanied me to this lovely city in Denmark, and we had a great time, both academically and socially. Aarhus has a very pleasant feel to it, and we certainly intend to be back in the future. You can get a flavour of what we saw from… Continue reading Bog people, Rosencrantz and a fake grave
Good news that Penelope Fitzgerald now has a permanent space on the web, and a little shameful that the originators are American- why couldn’t we manage it in Britain? Well, I suppose the web knows no boundaries, and it is an excellent site- congratulations to those who put it together. It’s curious, as Dovegreyreader says,… Continue reading Penelope Fitzgerald