… the nurse hoped to save my throbbing, empurpled thumbnail. But it might still be a goner. Have to wait and see. Rewind. Up to the point when I held on to the car door a nanosecond longer than I should have, it had been a perfect Easter weekend. Daughter was down from uni. The

With it coming up to Easter,  this week in Crystal Palace Community Choir we have mostly been singing in Latin. What a language! Gloriously ugly, yet transcendental. The tongue of angels and scholars and despair of teachers, with its probum this and homo erectus that. In choir we̵

Before I lose faith in all my latterday saints – chefs, journalists, antiques experts – can we get one thing straight: a small, thin, narrow piece of something is a sliver with a v. Not slither with a th. That’s for what snakes and not many other things do. Don’

Well, one confession, and the only one that matters in blogville. I haven’t been doing it. Yes, yes, like every other blogger I thought I was different. That the magic would never fade; the well of creativity and urgent need to share never dry up. But intoxication turned to cust

Currently reeling from a poll on the Oxford Dictionary blog. It asks  ‘Which of these spellings do you use?’, and you have to choose between mischievous and mischievious. Slightly surprised that this should even be considered a problem spelling, I nevertheless voted…

Because this is my very subjective response to the Daumier exhibition currently on at the Royal Academy. I want to say what it meant to me, but I’m hesitant. Daumier is not that well known. He’s like fresh snow. What right have I to go making dumbass snow angels on the per

Now don’t get me wrong, I love an artful barb as much as the next person. That’s why I read restaurant reviews. But if you’re trying to show that you’re cleverer than the waiter, be sure of your facts. Otherwise you go down like a punctured souffle. Giles Coren

Reading Lionel Shriver’s Big Brother, about a sister staging an intervention to slim down her morbidly obese brother, has got me thinking about gerunds. Because Lionel loves ’em to bits. Gerunds happen when you use a verb as a noun. It ends in ‘ing’,  and is ge

Today Horsefeathers is in holiday mode, as I reminisce about our Northern Tour a week or two ago. Other Half and I took a right-angled-triangle trip up to North East England, over to the North West via Scotland, and diagonally back down to London. I’m a Cheshire/Lancs girl: the