Blog

Kingdoms Collide            Word on the Week                     11th November 2023. The 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month in the year 1919 the first armistice day was held in the grounds of Buckingham Palace.   Optimistically, it was to commemorate the war to ‘end all wars’!   It is now known as Remembrance Day in […]

AI at Bletchley Park                 Word on the Week                 4th November 2023. This week the great and the good showed up at Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, the home of the UK principal centre of Allied code-breaking.  It became famous after WW2 having previously been kept secret. Its purpose today was not so much code-breaking […]

Halloween                            Word on the Week          28th October 2023. The name Hallowe’en comes from All Hallows’ Eve. It appears on the traditional church calendar, as the eve of All Saints’ Day. It arrives next Tuesday 31 st October the day Protestants remember Martin Luther’s spectacularly triggering of the reformation. On 1 st November, faithful Catholics will […]

Rain, Rain, Go to Spain         Word on the Week              21st October 2023. Rain, Rain, go to Spain and never come back again!   This, or something like it, was an unexpressed wish of many as they splashed through storm Babet yesterday.    There is something of a random nature about where these Atlantic storms will make […]

O Jerusalem                    Word on the Week                     14th October 2023. Once again the attention of the world is centred on Israel.  The Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu – mortified by intelligence lapses – has seized the opportunity to threaten the Hamas terrorists with extinction.   Their breaching of Israel’s Southern boundary occurred all too easily and the […]

Personal Pronouns                    Word on the Week          7th October 2023. Perhaps one of my most satisfactory joys of leaving childhood was to put behind me what I learned about pronouns.    In some ways I was glad I was not a Frenchman with their attributing either masculine or feminine gender to words.   One less thing to remember! […]

MV Matthew                     Word on the Week                     30th September 2023. The ship, under its new name, ‘Matthew’ sailed into Irish waters this week.   It had come from the Dutch island of Aruba in the South Caribbean as the MV Honmon to Willemstad in the Dutch protectorate of Curaçao on August 18th from where it sailed to […]

Stardust Fire                    Word on the Week                     23rd September 2023. It was St Valentine’s night, February 14th 1981 and the Stardust nightclub in Artane, Dublin, was packed to capacity.   A fire broke out which was to claim the lives of 48 young people and injure over 200.   It was tragic.    Such was the scale of […]

Rugby                               Word on the Week                     16th September 2023. In case there is someone who doesn’t know, the Rugby World Cup has got under way.   This is a world-wide event with Ireland lining out against Tonga tonight.   All games are being played in French Stadiums.    These are located in various cities culminating in the final in […]