Last week I spotted Gordon across the street doing his weekend shopping. I announced myself, and conversation flowed. Gordon is blind, so conversation is a little different from that with my other friends because we cannot make eye contact (indeed I rarely look at his eyes) and he cannot read my body language. However with…
Life’s little irritants
Phil Gould gets really rather ratty. Is it a sign of his rage? So what is it that really annoys you? What is it that sends you into a spasm of seethe or a descent into a slough of sulk – apart, that is, from reading a blog commencing with a raft of rhetoric or indeed…
Look back in Bognor
My tally for items lost in the last 12 months has just reached five. The outcomes have been varied - a mobile phone left on a bench was returned two weeks later after negotiating with an anonymous man and giving a ‘goodwill’ payment of £20. A cherished umbrella left hanging over a billboard in Oxford Street…
Tangled up in blue
Can white men sing the blues? There's clearly no point in asking guest contributor Neil Taylor... I was going to take my small son to the Science Museum to meet up with one of his older siblings and my wife was attempting to dress him for the journey. She called up the stairs to me, asking would…
Life after teeth
They say "once a dentist, always a dentist" but then what? Phil Gould wonders what it takes to be a writer. What’s in a word? Well, some course their way through our conversations with hardly a ripple, worthy if anonymous, like “patina” and “winglet”. Others might invite a subliminal snigger, like “wriggle” or “heave”. Others still…
Man in a hurry
I am now three years into my retirement and last month things changed. Suddenly I was a man in a hurry. At a dinner with six others, average age over seventy, it was clear that the each of us had decided how we would live out our lives in terms of what we should do…
What’s in a face
Just as I have a system for recalling words, I now have one for faces. For words I do a mind search. As others do, I scan through the alphabet focusing on each letter in turn looking for those that best match the starter letter of the lost word. I then run through second letters…
Collector’s peace
Last week some 250 friends gathered in my study. Until then they had been sitting on tabletops or in dusty cabinets or variously packed away in suitcases, boxes and plastic bags. We had been separated for anything from weeks, to months and years. But on that Friday morning we (that is, me and my elephant collection)…