Posts Tagged: personal bio

The sound of mucus

We all find it a bit difficult talking about the gunk we excrete when we are not well. When I went to see the doctor recently I prepared carefully to explain my symptoms. Our excellent, Old English word, snot, meaning the mucus from our nose is not a word you use to a highly trained […]
World Radio Day

Today is World Radio Day (13 February 2025). I did get a bit nostalgic and thought it worth a post as the radio was a strong connector to the communities I grew up in. Growing up in the 1970s in Scone, a rural town in Australia, in a time before the Internet, Youtube, podcasts, streaming […]
Spice up your day

I love Indian food. When I first lived in Sydney in the late 1970s and 1980s we would search out the (quite rare) curry houses and order the hottest thing on the menu—usually a vindaloo. I went to live in London for a a few years and it was like going to heaven because Indian […]
Phlebotomist—in a humorous vein

I went out with an old university mate of mine this week. Margot works in the health industry and, as I have spent a fair bit of time in a hospital this week as my elderly mother has injured herself in a fall, the conversation inevitably went to our health. I complained that I have […]
The true yokefellow

Over the Christmas period I was re-reading my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s biography—the Memoir of the Rev. Joseph Entwisle, Fifty-four Years a Wesleyan Minister. In this reading of the book I came across the wonderful word, yokefellow. When I researched the word, I found it resonated strongly with the book in a way not quite intended. The first […]
What plunger?

My wife and went away for the weekend with friends recently (August 2023) to the Southern Highlands south of Sydney (about a two hour drive). I took the afternoon off and went with our friends to the holiday house. My wife followed us down when she finished work. I had been in a bit of […]
Who is a whovian?

My Whovian life At 5:15 pm on 23 November 1963, the first episode of Doctor Who was broadcast on BBC One. It was delayed a few minutes because of the announcement of John F Kennedy’s assassination. I was a two and a half year old living in Guisborough, a small town in northern Yorkshire, England. […]
Roman revenge and gothic revival

An introduction to the goths Being gothic seems to be a common thing. We have gothic and neo-gothic architecture; gothic fonts; gothic literature and even in my youth a Goth post-punk music sub-culture. I lived in London in the mid to late 1980s. I was persuaded to go out one Friday night, straight after work […]
What sort of foodivore are you?

I eat a diet of fruit, vegetables and meats of all types. We classify animals as carnivores, herbivores or omnivores but what sort of foodivore are we? My carnivorous diet has included much of the animal kingdom including gastropods (snails, oysters, mussels, etc), arthropods (prawns, crabs and other shellfish), cephalopods (squid and octopus), fish, birds […]
Pretty, pretty Christmas baubles

When I was a boy living in Scone, in country NSW we still had a traditional Christmas along the lines of that which my parents had had growing up in England. This meant two things: firstly, that we sat around at midday on Christmas Day in sweltering heat (we had no air conditioning, see below) […]
Get with it guys

Head of the Diversity Council of Australia, David Morrison (Australian of the Year and former Chief of Army), launched a campaign (1 June 2016) that asked us to consider dropping inappropriate gender words and phrases from our workplaces. The #WordsAtWork campaign has singled out “guys”, which is commonly used to refer to a group including […]
Sacrifice—lest we forget

It is the 105th Anniversary of Anzac Day today and I am reposting one of my most meaningful words of the week. Sacrifice means to give something of value, often altruistically, with the hope of gaining something in return or to avoid greater loss. And from this comes supreme sacrifice: to give your life in the belief that […]

Psychobabble—mental health jargon10/09/2026
Psychobabble is psychological jargon used inaccurately and pretentiously that sometimes normalises unacceptable behaviour or criticises normal behaviour. It is also known as therapy-speak or pop psychology. A more specialised branch of psychobabble is neurobabble. It is the vocabulary of the consulting room that has escaped into everyday conversation—trauma, triggered, boundaries, validation, gaslighting. It turns the… Read more: Psychobabble—mental health jargon
Meeting behaviours04/09/2026
Australian professionals are experienced and well-educated yet put them in meetings with clear objectives, agendas to address, or problems to solve and peculiar behaviours start to manifest. The Ringelmann effect suggests that the more people in a meeting the less value they contribute. Max Ringelmann discovered in the 1880s that as more people pulled on… Read more: Meeting behaviours
Danish and “Viking marketing”24/08/2026
In AD 793 the Viking Age was kicked off when Viking raiders attacked Lindisfarne, an island off the northeast coast of England, plundered its Christian monastery, killed or enslaved the monks and appropriated its religious treasures. The Vikings were undoubtedly accomplished shipbuilders, sailors and traders, but their economic model was simpler—to leverage the quality of… Read more: Danish and “Viking marketing”