Buggered if I know…

Here it is: the next in the occasional series of posts on the subject of bogroll holders. Only two days ago, I came across a strange phenomenon. This time it was at our local, relatively posh, leisure centre. The loo in the female changing rooms upstairs has a LTRD which has, in the past, bitten [...]

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Reader of these posts may have noticed that in the past I was musing about the point of lockable toilet roll dispensers (LTRDs). A kind of follow-up to those broodings was vouchsafed to me the other day when I visited the loo at the end of the corridor at work. There was the LTRD on [...]

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Bog roll, toilet paper, bathroom tissue. Call it what you like; we all use it. Well, most of us … In fact, it used to be the case in the ‘good old days’ in Egypt that, when you went to visit an interesting site which had been open to the public for years and years, [...]

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My subject today, gentle reader, is shampoo. When I was a kid, we used to go to Germany to visit relatives every summer. This brought me into contact with the German language from an early age. Maybe it was that which engendered my interest in the way words are used, or maybe I inherited it [...]

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The question has been asked before many times, but it came spludging into the puddle of goo that passes for my brain whilst I was waiting to be seen by a specialist at a hospital nearby (oh, OK, I’ll level with you, it was Addenbrooke’s, Cambridge, UK). On arrival, I’d been handed a sheaf of [...]

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Why is it that some of us get so personally upset about things that really are beyond our control? From the purely local irritation, like a bureaucratic stupidity, to the apparent unwillingness of the people who really can make some difference to actually grasp the nettle of climate change — these things really get to [...]

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