You know how it goes. You’ve finished ferrying 16 items down the checkout conveyor and the assistant says: $142.99 – cash or card? “How do the poor people get by?” I ask of no-one in particular. Later, I went to the butcher ($47) and the organic fruit and vegetable shop ($56), all up $245. She Who Pays the Bills said: “But we only needed a few things”. Now if we were on unemployment benefit, such profligacy…
For most people who like to travel, Antarctica is probably not on the list of places they aspire to visit. I say that because, although visitor numbers to the frozen continent have risen 50% in recent years, the numbers are tiny on the mass tourism scale. People with some curiosity about the seventh continent can satisfy it by reading books or viewing any of these recommended documentaries. Armchair travel obviously did not do it for the 73,…
Considering I once entered a roundabout the wrong way, I’ve so far managed to survive life as an impractical man. If you’ll permit me to misquote a line from that Kinks song (Lola): “Well I’m not the world’s most practical guy..” Such thoughts emerged last week as I haplessly searched for our car in the local shopping centre car park. “What does it look like, mate?” asked a passer-by, trying to be helpful. ”It’s a…
It doesn’t take much to cause members of the Ancient Order for the Preservation of Proper English (AOPPE) to fly off the handle. A misplaced modifier, a literal, verb confusion, homophonic confusion (a pear of undies) or noun-verbing will do it every time. There are old phrases akin to ‘fly off the handle’ (to lose one’s temper), in Tony Maniaty’s memoir of a half-Greek kid growing up in 1950s Brisbane. Maniaty employs sayings of the day…