An heuristic purchase of logic

The current cover

The previous cover

Yesterday, I visited Matlock Bath with my family. It is the place where my parents honeymooned back in the 1950s before their idealistic world was forever altered by the arrival of a child. After a pleasant meeting with some old friends in a café where they serve exotic coffees in the kind of receptacles normally reserved for afternoon tea, we went to the Oxfam bookshop. ¶ It’s all in Middle English gasped my daughter as she opened a copy of an OUP Chaucer (thus making her father proud, yet pushing her further to the edges of her X-factor watching generation). This was purchased along with a copy of Wilfrid Hodges Logic, a Penguin book. When I skimmed the book later on, I realised that I had purchased a book I already owned, but the original had been a Pelican book: my heuristic, scattergun approach was confused by the new dress and change of badge. I suppose that means I need this/these books more than ever — maybe I’ll read it twice. ¶ This is not the first time I have bought something I already owned.

Bad language = ‘Pre-prepared’

This text was prepared offline and when I was confident that it expressed what I wanted to say, I posted it. However, it seems that preparing things is no longer adequate, they must be pre-prepared. I have heard this redundant little adjective dropping from the mouths of people I would normally consider to be thoughtful and intelligent. ¶ There is a little button at the side of the editor in which I am typing that invites me to ‘Preview this Post’. That’s grand, but because I’m passionate about technology, I think I’d like to look at it before I look at it.

Transplanting hair

I’ve had it made painfully clear over the years that my hair is foppish; that what grows out of the top of my head makes me look like the lovechild of Melvyn Bragg/Barry Gibb or Daryl Hall/David Hasselhoff. Most of these hurtful comments have been manufactured by are borne of resentment from men who are bald, or at least, thinning. ¶ My wife has informed me that hair transplants are a B R U T A L process and this elicited in me a wave of compassion for those who are destined to be thatchless. Nevertheless, I remain an unrepentantly hirsute popinjay.