Things Not to Say to a Woman, No.57

The following exchange took place over lunch. Mrs F: So on Christmas Eve I thought we’d have the grandchildren for the afternoon. Give the girls a chance to get on with their preparations. Mr F: What preparations?

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The First Turkey of Christmas

An early night when we had expected a late one. The Abbey Theatre’s production of The Government Inspector was so dire we felt compelled to activate our ejector seats at the end of Act I. On paper it looked like a winner: a play by Gogol adapted by Roddy Doyle. So where did it go wrong? Well, everywhere, actually. The casting…

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Back in Business

  All that’s left of my birthday cake, very kindly baked for me by my step-daughter Kate. My regular reader may remember that I make a ridiculous fuss about my birthday, particularly for a woman who’s reached an age when she should be happy to let it slip by unnoticed.  It’s my mother’s fault. Birthday-wise my childhood was a…

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And Something Else to Treasure

No, not Donald Trump. But this was the best image I could find of a hatless man in a gale. My theme is tradition. In particular the song which to all intents is  –  or rather was  – the national anthem of Yorkshire but which a measly 10 percent of recently polled Yorkshire schoolchildren had even…

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Endangered Species

  I’ve been encouraged to continue my (probably futile) campaign against automated supermarket checkouts by the way my regular checkout lady remembered a) that I’d been on holiday and b)where to. I now make it a rule to choose a human over a machine on all possible occasions. However… the lure of Internet shopping is very powerful. …

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Time Out

  Mr F has his best buddy coming to stay this weekend so I guess there’ll be some Guy Stuff going down. PSA levels discussed, electric sanders compared, tennis games of yesteryear revisited. I don’t want to get in the way so I thought I’d go off and do some Girl Stuff. The question is, what?…

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Ordure in the Cathedral

    Who pooped on the rug? That’s the question before us. The cleaners at St Paul’s say someone did and I’m sure it wasn’t the Bishop of London. The Occupy-As-Near-As-We-Can-Get-To-The-Stock-Exchange spokesperson swears it wasn’t any of them. Who, then? Some agent provocateur from Fox News? I fear we may never know. At Occupy Dame Street in…

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And So, In a Very Real Sense…

I realise this is getting repetitive. At this rate Robbing Hood of Canterbury will soon have featured in as many of my posts as Her Non-Royal Fergieness, but I have to add my voice to the many who’ve  suggested that the Archbishop shut up and put his own crumbling house in order. I haven’t been to…

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