Steve_Bamlett_blog

What’s your favorite word? This piece is dedicated to Heppy, who as well as being a man of his word is also wise because he knows words are links to each other and between us all. He is a hero. And a teacher. Lucky students. Whether we are religious or not, we live in a … More My favourite word is NOT ‘WORD’. Because the Word on its own is not everything but it keeps pretending it is.

What are you doing this evening? Swan Lake was the first ballet I ever saw, apart from a rather ill-understood experience of Don Quixote in Moscow on a programmed trip of Moscow & the then Leningrad arranged by Intourist (the state tourist agency of communist Russia – Gorbachev was President then). I wrote about it … More This evening I am seeing a screening of Matthew Bourne’s ‘Swan Lake’ at the Gala Cinema, Durham.

What personality trait in people raises a red flag with you? Image from : https://www.carp.ca/2014/03/07/ask-expert-red-flags-investing/ People don’t walk around with ‘red flags’, even to announce anymore the danger posed by a motor car, yet we are asked to see them everywhere – to look for the ‘red flag’ warnings that situation is not as safe … More Red flags are alerts from our own self-defence systems. Can they sometimes be over-vigilant and deny us new experience unnecessarily.

Name the professional athletes you respect the most and why. At last, I thought, the daily prompt question setters at Word Press have set a question I cannot turn to my own purposes neither politically nor personally. Maybe however, I am underplaying the extremely weird connectivity of the synapses controlling links in my memory and … More Why you still don’t ‘out’ the athletes who identify as LGBTQI+ but still have to ‘respect them most’. To emphasise that I name no living athlete, even those who have dared openly living as gay or queer.

How do you relax? Frankie Goes to Hollywood ‘Relax’ 12″ Disc by Personal camera, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7794234 I was at least 29 when I first laughed out loud at the word ‘Relax’, because it was 1983, I was just starting a job at a University of London affiliated institute and being gay was still a … More The ambiguous release of tension

If you had to give up one word that you use regularly, what would it be? One may not be such an authority on how even just you use even one word of which you think you are master. Hear out this debate, one that ought to matter a lot in the discussion of languages … More When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. So why bother losing ‘one word’ when it might be any word..