Robert Lloyd - a Sir Gar Blog of random news . . . and some Clecs!

  A WISE man once declared, “You can live to be a 100 if you give up all things that make you want to live to be a 100.” OK, I’ll pause there, as it wasn’t a very wise man. It was film director Woody Allen who said it – and he doesn’t get into the Top Three of Wise Men in my book. But . . . that doesn’t mean I don’t agree with the essence of what he said, particularly as I am now in the ‘pensionable age’ bracket. You name it, and I’ve got it – free bus pass, senior railway card, a stent in the ticker, a multi-tiered pillbox for all my medicines, dodgy knees and arthritis in the ankles. With the discounted travel cards, I could hatch an escape plan, but I suspect the legs would let me down and I wouldn’t get very far. Sometimes, I think the travel option may be over-rated as the world seems to come to me, via unsolicited mail and publicity flyers through the letterbox and unwanted emails through the electronic inbox. For example, this week started badly with two flyers. The first su...

  TIME was when I was young enough (and twp enough!) to talk about making a ‘fox pass’. As a young cub reporter, I even committed the cardinal sin of scribbling ‘fox pass’ in a news story. My editor at the time stopped short of a sharp rap across the knuckles with a metal ‘em’ ruler, but the verbal dressing down in the newsroom was enough to make sure I got the message that a ‘fox pass’ is a ‘faux pas’. Faux pas literally means ‘false step’ in French, and that’s a great description of what you do when you make a faux pas. Some dictionaries describe a ‘faux pas’ as meaning a significant or embarrassing error or mistake. In other words, a blunder, a gaffe or a mistake. In 50 years of scribbling, I’ve made several blunders. In fact, during just the last fortnight, I’ve managed to make three. So, if you do that maths, I reckon my faux pas career tally may well be approaching the five digits mark. My three ‘faux pas’ (if that is the correct plural of the phrase) included making an eight...

YOU’RE going to have to trust me on this one – it won’t be bad luck if you read this column today . . . honest . . . promise . . . cross my heart. Yes, it’s Friday the 13 th  (only the second Friday the 13 th  in the 2024 calendar). It’s a fair bet that if you survived the one in September, you’ll manage to get through today – even if I take a little bit of delight in reminding you just how superstitious us human beings can be. There is a medical word for the fear of Friday the 13 th . It is paraskevidekatriaphobia – a word which just sent my spell-checker into overdrive. The word paraskevidekatriaphobia was devised by Dr Donald Dossey, a California-based clinical psychologist who had a sideline as a folklore historian. Dr Dossey would tell suffering patients that they had paraskevidekatriaphobia – but he would cheerfully add, “when you learn to pronounce it, you’re cured!” As it happens, Friday the 13 th  doesn’t bother me that much, but I did take the precaution of writ...