Blog
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#andnowforsomethingcompletelydifferent
I’ll never forget the first time I saw my name in a magazine (school mags excepted). It wasn’t actually the name that gave me such a thrill because in those days I used a pen name – it was the story. I had written a romantic short story, Perfect Partners, and there it was in…
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2016 – the best of times and the worst of times… (a minimalist’s version)
The death of David Bowie on January 10th was a shock to many people, including me, and 2016 did seem to provide us with more than usual ‘famous deaths’. It’s been a big year in politics, too. But here’s my personal take on the past 12 months: Best book moment: Holding Chosen Child for the…
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Goodbye, Prague…
I took enough pics to keep the blog busy for months on end, but we’ll stop here. A trilogy of posts is enough. So – the final photos… The streets around my hotel reminded me of the film Goodbye, Lenin! which came out in the early noughties. It’s about a young East German whose dedicated…
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Top Ten Books
What are your 10 all-time favourite books, and why? asked The Book Club last week on Facebook. Most people said their favourites changed according to mood and time of day, and I agree. It’s a while since we’ve had a ‘books’ post on the blog, so here are my favourites: 1. The School at the…
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Prague – the hanging man, and the speediest escalators ever…
Prague is an easy city to get around in. Most of the sights in the centre are within walking distance of each other, and for the rest, you can buy an all-day transport ticket for a very reasonable price. The buses and trams come every few minutes. And then there’s the underground… One of my…
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The Week of Small Frustrations…
We had a technology revolt in the flat last week. One device after another either went on strike, or disintegrated into a pile of metal, plastic and frustration (mine). The landline phone went first. It’s been sulking for a while, but last week it began to remind me of the worst kind of teenage stroppiness.…
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Prague: John Lennon, the upside down horse, and Frank Kafka…
I spent a week in Prague recently, visiting Son 2 who is spending a semester at uni there. What an amazing city; I could blog all week and still not do it justice. So here are a few pics of some of the best bits of my week: To start with, the lovely view over…
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Sitting in Switzerland…
It’s good to sit down after a long day at work, or a hike through town. Or just because you want to treat yourself to a coffee/wine/chat with a friend. Here are some of the more interesting sitting places I’ve come across this year. First of all, summertime in Bad Ragaz. (Johanna Spyri’s Heidi passed…
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Doctor! Doctor!
Like most people who have ever taught English as a foreign language, I have a large collection of jokes. If you give your students a page of text to read as homework, they may or may not do it. If, however, you give them a page of jokes on the same subject, it’s a different…
Got any book recommendations?
linda huber 