Aniseed Balls

Some seven years ago I asked for an explanation of the expression used by tennis commentators, “ making the opponent play one more shot ”, and set a challenge to explain how we might measure the idea. As predicted, no one met that challenge, though someone did note ironically that making an opponent play one more shot isn’t as good as making them play no more shots. That particular idiotic expression isn’t used much any more – commentators are on to a different idiotic expression: “backing oneself to succeed”. Occasionally this is used as a tired metaphor for being very confident, but my complaint concerns its use in tennis and especially cricket to describe what a player has just done on court or at the wicket. It is used approvingly in an attempt to explain and justify a play resulting in a winning shot or a boundary. But as with the other aforementioned idiom, it explains nothing. All we have is hindsight: it worked on that occasion. There is no attempt to assess whether the play ...

They built a seat for weary feet, Upon the Isle of Lundy. They built a path, they built a cafe. Sic transit gloria mundi.

It won’t have escaped your notice that UK banking is in a sorry state. My personal experience of domestic banks over the last forty years is that they are singularly incompetent at everything they do. I won’t bore you with a catalogue of woes, but I will share my latest experience with you. My partner and I have a joint mortgage with Halifax. The other day we received a letter as follows:    Dear Mr Dobson & Miss Jordan That’s it! That is the entire letter. See the scanned image. The only manipulation I’ve done is to blur out our postal address.

I am strongly in favour of maintaining legalized abortions in the UK. There is no doubt in my mind that Government plans to change abortion advice services are the result of lobbying from anti-abortion campaigners. I suspect this stems from the first TV ads by Marie Stopes last year, which received over 1000 complaints to the advertising watchdog. All of the complaints were rejected. It is completely wrongheaded to imagine that women seek abortion advice because of moral ambiguity. What they want and need is medical information about the procedure and risks, and unbiased counselling about the personal benefits and alternatives. What they do not need is religious doctrine dressed up as personal advice. If I want to know the psychological risks of amputation, then the first person I would ask would be the surgeon and the last person would be the priest. (For that matter the psychiatrist would be pretty far down the list as well.) Nobody is in any doubt about what happens to a foetus...

When a friend of mine told me that the Ryder Cup was about to begin, she was outraged when I casually enquired if the American cheating had started. Golf is supposed to be an oasis of honesty, etiquette, fair play and self-regulation in a sporting desert of deceit and over-enthusiastic gamesmanship. The Ryder Cup is the pinnacle of international competition in the sport, played by professionals in a temporary state of Corinthian amateurism: there is no prize money, only glory. Surely not even Americans would cheat at that? The 1991 Ryder Cup is notorious for the continued spat between Paul Azinger and Seve Ballesteros. Azinger insisted that he had not been trying to cheat, and Ballesteros retorted, "Oh no. Breaking the rules and cheating are two different things." He thought he was being sarcastic, but actually hit the nail very much on the head. For many Americans breaking the rules and getting away with it is not cheating. For these people the proprieties of a sport are f...

My youngest daughter has a bedroom shelf full of cosmetic products. I pointed to one and asked what it was. "It's fake tan", came the answer. "What's this one?", I asked pointing to another. "It's fake tan", she said again. I indicated another one and repeated the question. Same reply. She then explained that they were different formulations with different application methodologies and had different levels of permanence, and that she had two more which I hadn't asked about. A couple of days later she breezed into the house to join us for dinner. "What's that on your face?" asked Mum. "Oh", she says, casual as you like. "It probably creosote." "But it's all over" says Mum. "Oh, then it's probably dirt from yesterday." I'm really proud of her!

When I first heard Leonard Cohen's famous song Hallelujah , I thought the last line of the first verse was The barefoot king composing Hallelujah This makes sense in reference to 2 Samuel 15:30 And David went up by the ascent of mount Olivet, and wept as he went up, and had his head covered, and he went barefoot: and all the people that was with him covered every man his head, and they went up, weeping as they went up. But all the lyric sources on the internet including Cohen's official site have the line as The baffled king composing Hallelujah which makes no sense whatever in the context of the verse.  Can anyone suggest why David might have been baffled rather than barefoot?  Does anyone have evidence to suggest that the words have been changed through error?