William Tell was a touchy fellow and became quite vain about his own legend as a folk hero. At the battle of Morgarten a captured officer was brought to him for interrogation. The Austrian did not recognise him and asked, quite innocently, to whom he was speaking. This so incensed the great archer that he seized a halberd from one of the guards and ( Read more... )

People have been asking for explanations of some cryptic clues I have been putting onto Facebook and Twitter.

The general principle of cryptic crosswords
Each clue 1 divides into two parts: there is a straight definition of the answer, and some cryptic word play that indicates the exact wording, generally by treating it as a collection of letters ( Read more... )

Another from the archive, February 2001. Written for and first published in oxbridge.tat, a newsgroup whose sole purpose was distraction. The thread was entitled "Utilitarianism", but it had evidently drifted a long way from there. Let's now call it

IncompletionsI never reared a young gazelle ( Read more... )

Hey! Where did my Friends page go? All entries bar the last twenty have vanished. Wah.

A response to this thoughtful and rather beautiful sonnet on a childhood home no longer owned.

On which, however, a lawyer commented: "Much more creative than any of your former colleagues' tax planning and far more emotive :-)"

The house? It's still our home; it's just ( Read more... )

This comes from a Facebook thread which was mostly about Wendy Cope.I ( Read more... )

[Written to read aloud at the end of a Hallowe'en party in the Community Library for about forty overexcited primary-age children. Probably 500 words too long for all except the oldest of them.]

( Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. )

Arthur C Clarke began the foreword to 2001, A Space Odyssey:
"Behind every man alive stand thirty ghosts: for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living"
This was actually true in 1945. By the time 2001 was published, in 1968, the figure was twenty. In 2001, twelve. Today, according to the UN tool the BBC have put online, below ten ( Read more... )

The platypodes
Of the antipodes
Show the gaiety
Of the Deity.

Dendrochronologists do it with natural logs.