Latest News, Blog and Editorial

Hello – October 2008

You can’t cure a cold or ’flu’ but everyone has their own method for relieving the symptoms. In fact, ask fifty people and you’ll get fifty different answers.
When our family came down with colds recently, we were given all sorts of advice regarding home remedies, but we find the old family favourite always works [more…]

From the Vault – How to Compile a Crossword

Interested in becoming a crossword compiler?

You’re in luck! Hidden beneath the dust bunnies during a recent spring-clean we discovered a typewritten aid for compiling crosswords written by none other than Crossword Queen, Christine Lovatt. And much to our surprise and delight the advice contained therein still holds true.

So, if you want to try [more…]

Hello – August 2008

With the Olympic Games upon us, it’s quite interesting to see the origins of the names of some Olympic sports.
The name Olympics comes from where it all started, in Olympia, a district in ancient Greece where athletic contests were held every four years.
Badminton is played with a battledore and shuttlecock. Battledore comes from the [more…]

Hello – May 2008

The English language has the largest vocabulary of any language which is not surprising when you think that it is made up of Celtic, Germanic, Latin, Viking and French languages, not to mention all the words borrowed from Africa and Asia.
English is now the everyday speech of more than four hundred million people around [more…]

Unique Blocks

UNIQUE BLOCKS are essential tools for solving Kakuro and Killer Sudoku/Addoku puzzles. For example a total of 4 in 2 squares is a UNIQUE BLOCK. It can’t be 2 + 2 because each line of numbers can contain only one of each numeral. So the two squares can have only 1 or 3, though [more…]

Hello – April 2008

The word exotic comes from the Greek exotikos, literally ‘from the outside’. So if we had visited Ancient Greece, they may have described us as exotic, because they used it to mean ‘foreign’.

Exotic plants and birds come from another land, but exotic also means ‘attractively strange’, or maybe that should be ‘strangely attractive’. (I’m [more…]

Hello – March 2008

Easter will be here on 23rd March this year. In the Christian church, it’s a time of celebration, the end of the Lenten fasting period. To many people Easter is a time when people dressed as rabbits wander about the local shopping centre scaring children. It also means eating lots of chocolate eggs and [more…]

Hello – February 2008

One of the most recognisable shapes is the heart, featured in this month’s magazine cover not just because of our Red Cross connection but also because of the St Valentine’s Day date.
In ancient times the heart, rather than the brain, was considered to be the seat of thought, including memory and imagination.
There was much [more…]

Hello – January 2008

Reader Graham Ennis recently wrote to query our use of humble pie and asks if it should be umble pie.

Anyone who admits to making a mistake has to eat humble pie and interestingly, the humble pie expression is itself the result of a mistake.

Numbles were originally the entrails of a deer. While the lord [more…]