Okay, in no particular order… * * * * * I’ve created a separate Twitter account for me to talk Esperanto and follow people who are talking Esperanto. It’s @jonnonekso. (Although that’s something of a provisional user name). I think that’s pronounced something like “Yon-no Neck-so”, with short “o”s. The two names end in letter [...]

In yesterday’s post I explained why I wanted to learn a second language. In today’s post I’ll try and explain why I’ve selected Esperanto as my language to learn. Why? Well it basically comes down to three things. It’s easy. I like the ideals and culture behind it. And I love the elegance of the [...]

Well having listed in the previous post all the German that I’d learned, I have of course spent the afternoon remembering things. Firstly, “Wo ist?”, which I think means “Where is?”. Something is, anyway. I remember that one because of an incident that happened in my third year of German. A friend of mine was [...]

My name’s Jonny, and I’m a monoglot. I speak and write English, and that’s it. I know many non-English speakers will think I’m lazy. Stupid even. I think I’m neither lazy nor stupid, but if it’s any consolation, being unable to speak more than one language is a quite a source of annoyance to me. [...]

I’ve just started reading a book called Tied In: The Business, History and Craft of Media Tie-In Writing, which is the result of a collaboration by several members of The Internation Association of Media Tie-in Writers. I bought it after Matt Forbeck (@mforbeck), who’s one of the contributors, recommended it on his blog. What’s a [...]

A few nights ago I went to the Krater Comedy Club at Brighton’s Komedia. I’d seen other acts, the Maydays for example, at Komedia, but had thus far avoided the Krater Comedy Club, figuring its humour would be targeted at pissed-up hen and stag parties. But my brother was in town, and we wanted to [...]

I read an article in Metro today saying that Gordon Brown’s later book wasn’t doing too well sales-wise: Meanwhile, sales of Gordon Brown’s latest book have flopped in the four months since it was released, leaving thousands of copies in bookstore bargain bins. The former prime minister’s speeches collection, Change We Choose, is ranked number [...]

A generation or two ago, foreign holidays were for the rich only. Everyone else took their holidays on British beaches and swam in British seas. Then came the advent of cheap Mediterranean package holidays and somewhere along the way a particularly pernicious myth (which I’ve been encountering recently on Twitter) grew up among the people [...]

These were the three thoughts that went through my mind when I read the following in a news report about Raoul Moat’s funeral in today’s Metro newspaper: One stranger was Theresa Bystram, 45, who travelled 480km (300 miles) from Weybridge, Surrey, on an overnight coach with three of her teenage sons to be at the [...]

A while ago there was a series of very good articles on Slate by Julia Turner about signage, and a discipline known as “wayfinding”, which wikipedia defines thus: Wayfinding encompasses all of the ways in which people and animals orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place. That might sound a bit [...]