26 Letters

  Hatred. What a word! Filled smackeroo-blurdy with power, and evil. Let's take a quick look at how hatred is born. What is there in our human condition that leads us to hate? I would contend that, overwhelmingly, it's fear. Fear and loathing. In Las Vegas. Or is it RotoVegas? Seriously, though: Fear leads either to submission: enslaving oneself to fear. That's an all-too common reaction, and not to be desired. Fear can, very occasionally, lead to questioning: is the fear rational? Is it phobic? What can we do to cure ourselves of fear? To save ourselves from fear? Or fear can lead to blind action: the active desire to strike out at what is feared, and to smash it into oblivion. To hatred. How this latter kind of reaction comes about is interesting, and I will look at it with a new feature called a Noodle. See below. But right now let's simply accept that we are dealing with a pandemic of fear, and Covid is only a tiny part of it. Let's also accept that we have ...

 There are billions, and perhaps even trillions of combinations we can make out of our 26-letter alphabet. Some, like the words Big Pharma come up with to name their drugs, are unspellable by normal folk. But they all have an "X" in them, and often a "Z" as well. They are the tail-feeders of words. Some, like "rhythm", have no vowels. But then, some entire languages have no, or very few, vowels - yes, Polish, we're looking at you. Welsh is simply an absurdity, although it has given us some handy words. And I'm sure some start with "G". If a person can be Gormless, then it suggests that there must be a thing called "Gorm". My Chambers dictionary, however, refers me to "gaum", which is a clumsy daub, or clay, used in poor housing in the Iron Age. It can also mean "understanding".  And this is where, historically, I have not always been the most successful of individuals. I don't think I have ever been entir...

  26 Letters: all the words in the Bible (originally written by a bunch of bronze and iron-age Middle eastern folk), Newton's Principia, Darwin's little pocketbook about the Ascent of Man, and - of course - those invaluable intellectual tomes "The Illuminati" and the collected Dan Brown "novels"...  all those words and ideas and stuff, all made up of those 26 Letters. Howzat, Esperanto! I occasionally wonder which came first: Fear, or Faith? And were they driven by Facts, or explained away by Facts? These are the thoughts that take hold of me when I wake at 3.00am, and can't be bothered getting up to have a leak. So I lie there, clenching whatever muscles require clenching to avoid drastic leakage, Fart a little, and think. Generally, I think that Faith came after Fear. It was perfectly natural for prehistoric humans to have a fear of natural phenomena - fire, floods, lightning, and wolverines. Wolverines were self explanatory: a vicious little bastard o...

  The 26 Letters and 10 numbers we all play with every have astonishing power: they can slow us down in traffic, tell us about the wonderful time we will have with (INSERT BRAND NAME HERE) in our lives; introduce us to Ents; and help us believe in money. If we are to revere Saints, let them be the ones who first thought of using a common mark to represent a common sound. Like the letter E. Entropy is an accepted concept in reality: all things wear out. We are aware of the idea when we are younger, because we see it every day. Cars, flash and new, become shabby and old. A bright coin, offering hope at the beginning of its life and able to purchase a news paper will be dull and careworn in just a few years, and capable only of paying for a stick of chewing gum. Our bodies are the same. They, with time, deteriorate. They stop being as lively and fecund as they were at age 25. Even at that age they are past their best. But, with regular exercise, a half-decent diet, and a reasonably he...

Our alphabet, with its 26 glowing symbols, is, I fear, too short. Too many letters are tasked with representing too many sounds. It really isn't a case of WYSIWYG. Our vowels stretch according to their whereabouts in a word. Our consonants multi-task. We could (pron: kood. Not kowld. Or Sowld.) look at altering the spelling (Webster was partially successful at this, and we English English writers are still sneering at American English spelling 200 years later) or simply rejoice in the fact that English eccentricity, the only truly appealing thing to come out of that odd little island, is typified by the language, the spelling, and our terribly truncated alphabet.  There is, really, nothing special about the Day. It's reasonably cool, given that we're in the last weeks of Autumn. Rain is falling, and there is no sound of birdsong. It is, however, the first day of my 70th year. I am eagerly anticipating my birthday gifts, which does show that I am still addicted, in some smal...

  Music has just 8 notes. Those 8 notes are used in works as diverse as Schubert’s String Quartet No 14 in D Minor… and the always invigorating David Bowie’s classic “Rubber Ducky”.  He may never be forgiven for that particular song. How much luckier are we letter-slingers! We have 26 letters to spray around! The same number as Hemingway, Burke, and Blyton! The following may well be my Rubber Ducky.   Cats are curious creatures. Indeed, curiosity can be fatal to cats. Not cars, cucumbers, or calliopes, just curiosity. I like cats much more than I like dogs, and I like dogs quite a lot. I just don’t want to live with one. Cats allow me to live with them. They share themselves, sparingly. Dogs are in your face 100% of the time, needy and unhappy unless you’re throwing something away so they can bring it back.  Stupid dogs. That’s why the homes of dog-owners are filled with stuff: they just cannot throw it away. Fortunately, it’s now impossible to throw Cash...