Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail. I was a student at UCL in the early 1970s and in my first year had a room at a single-sex University of London residence near Kings Cross (it’s lost to history now in lots of ways and replaced by a glossy privatised version of student … More If the way to a straight  guy’s heart is via his satisfied stomach, this was some failure to woo. A student day’s tale.

Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life. It is almost certain that Socrates never said, as people sometimes believe, anything like, ‘All I know is that I know nothing’, but then can we we truly ever be certain about anything. How people came to believe he said this is explained in … More I wish I had believed about myself what Socrates was said to believe about himself when Plato quotes him as saying, “I neither know nor think I know”.

How often do you walk or run? We are just leaving York where we have been visiting a second-hand book fair, but I thought about this prompt in the hotel room; the rain at the time was beating down outside and I thought responding to both stimuli: “It would be silly to go for a … More Forget your exercise routine. Get yourself a Daisy.

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..