Authors Electric

I’ve been editing my website/blog recently. I thought it was time to update pages, since I’ve recently retired, and maybe prune a lot of stuff before thinking about moving over to Wordpress, as blogger just gets more and more difficult to use. It looks like pruning might be easier than I thought since at least 50% of the links no longer work!  I don’t check this kind of thing regularly – maybe I should – but I admit to being surprised. Some of the links to bigger and more commercial sites are gone, and I’ve learned a huge lesson here to keep copies of blog posts as I suspect they are gone for good. I blogged on and off for several years for the Harrogate Crime Festival – and it was a good ten years ago, but I didn’t expect the whole online You’re Booked ‘community’ website to simply vanish without trace, especially since the festival is bigger than it used to be. Annoyingly, while I’d reposted on my website, I had only posted the first paragraph with a link to the full article el...

Slippery stuff, Time.  Aarrgghh it’s my time of the month again! No not that one, shame really as I rather like waterskiiing, being towed on skates by dogs, parachuting and all the other pastimes enabled by the purchase of a box of Tampax. I mean my monthly Authors Electric blog post day, viz and to whit, today. It’s frankly terrifying how quickly that day comes around, and it’s speeding up all the time. Tampax are wonderful - you can do stuff like this! Time is funny stuff, infinitely flexible – unlike most things, it speeds up as we age. On Christmas night, as a child, it seems like a lifetime until Christmas day will come again, but now, it hardly seems worth putting the decos back in the attic before they’ll have to be lugged down again. Weeks fly by. It always seems to be Thursday. Time sprints when we have a lot to do and a tight deadline, or something fabulous happening, but then it drags, such as when you are waiting in Accident and Emergency. Note to sel...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/morten_liebach/  No, that's not my desk. (Although I have to admit at the moment it's not far off.) This is a good illustration of 'Tagarene' (or clutter)  I used to have a regular 'Monday spot' on my  own blog, entitled 'weird words.' My source of wisdom when it comes to all things wordly is Michael Quinion* who stated about the word 'Tagarene' which I featured some time ago - "You're unlikely to know this word - variously spelled - unless you come from north-east England, especially the Newcastle area. But it does occasionally pop up in prose that gains a wider audience..." "...A tagarene shop was a kind of junk shop, sometime specialising in old clothes but often carrying a much wider range of miscellaneous oddments, particularly marine scrap. The tagarene man who ran it did much of his trade with ships..." Well my whole house, not just my desk has been like a tagarene s...