Nov 20, 2021 | Essays, Non-Fiction |
The cliche is blamed for spoiling language and style. While this may be true, its destructive power is much more profound. The cliche blurs the difference between truth and untruth. If it were not for cliches, there wouldn’t be demagogues and public lies, and it...
Jul 2, 2020 | Geekery, Non-Fiction |
Heckling is, or once was, the process of removing the knots from wool. Sheep are notoriously lackadaisical about their appearance, so before their wool can be turned into a nice warm jumper it must be combed. It’s easy to see how combing wool and teasing out the knots...
Mar 28, 2020 | Non-Fiction, Travel |
Although I knew Gaelic to be richly responsive to the sites in which it was spoken, it was my guess that other tongues in these islands also possessed wealths of words for features of place – words that together constituted a vast vanished, or vanishing, language for...
May 25, 2019 | Non-Fiction |
I left the Rio Negro and went on south to Port Madryn. A hundred and fifty-three Welsh colonists landed here off the brig Mimosa in 1865. They were poor people in search of a New Wales, refugees from cramped coal-mining valleys, from a failed independence movement,...
