writing and writers – Page 113 – don't confuse the narrator

I could care less

This week I had to fill in a form to register for a new doctor. Last time I registered was when I returned to the UK after 25 years living abroad; that was a fairly painless process, the only confusion being when they asked for my National Health number and I gave one in a format that they stopped using last century.

This time, although I had the right format number, I had to fill in a ten page questionnaire with all sorts of slightly bizarre questions. The one that caught my attention most was:

If someone cares for you, what is their name and telephone number?

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like it or not

I started writing this blog back in 2007 and there are currently 875 published posts. At the beginning I didn’t tell anyone I was blogging and the readership grew very slowly. Even now, although there are usually a few people who press the ‘like’ button each time I update, the posts don’t inspire many comments.
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going home

Many years ago I used to regularly read the Peanuts cartoon in the Sunday colour supplement; occasionally, I would cut one out and put it with other bits and pieces in a scrapbook. I remember the last panel of one of these cartoons showing a fairly despondent Snoopy saying, “Thomas Wolfe was right: you can’t go home again.”
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a choice of viewing

The marvels of technology allow us to watch TV even if we don’t actually have a television set, and to watch programmes at times totally unrelated to when they are actually broadcast. I found this film on offer recently:

"The Thing from Another World" listing on iPlayer

What really caught my attention was how close I had come to missing it after all these years:

First shown 1951: available till Tuesday

I wonder if they really did keep their word and remove it on Tuesday or whether, like David Bowie, they decided they “might be able to stretch it till Wednesday”:
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the real thing

Browsing the online sales pages, I came across this:

I’m glad the description warns me that it is an imitation. But I would rather like to know what a real Mongolian cushion looks like.

On the other hand, years ago, an American colleague assured me that faux pas was pronounced “fox paw”. So perhaps this cushion is made from the fur of the Faux Mongolian – a relative of the Siberian Fox, I suppose, but adapted to a grassier terrain if the colour is anything to go by.