1 May: Chimney Sweep's Day

Today is Chimney Sweep’s Day. Here are ten things you might not know about chimney sweeps:

1. This date has no doubt been chosen as Chimney Sweep’s Day because in the times when children were sent up chimneys to clean them, May Day was the only day they had off. Which is also why celebrations for chimney sweeps often feature Jack-in-the-Green.

2. Chimney sweeps are generally thought to be lucky. It’s not clear why this should be but one theory is that a sweep once saved William the Conqueror in 1066 from a runaway Horse and carriage, and as a reward, the sweep was invited to a royal wedding. Since chimneys in houses weren’t even a thing until the 12^th century I wonder about that one. Another theory is the story of a sweep who fell off a roof, and caught his foot on the gutter. A girl helped him climb through her window and the two ended up getting married.

3. Seeing a chimney sweep at your wedding is especially lucky and a sign that the marriage will be long and happy. Hence there’s a tradition of inviting a sweep to your wedding to make sure you see one.

4. Probably the most famous chimney sweep is the one in Mary Poppins, played by Dick van Dyke. In the song Chim Chim Cheree, he sings that shaking hands with, or blowing a Kiss to, a sweep is lucky.

5. In Poland and Croatia, people are considered lucky if they rub a Button on their clothing while passing a chimney sweep on the street.

6. There’s another tradition associated with New Year in which chimney sweeps would walk through the streets holding a Pig and villagers would pay a small amount of Money to make a wish while they pulled a hair from the pig. Depictions of chimney sweeps are a popular New Year's Day gift in Germany.

7. “Spazzacamini” is the Italian word for “chimney sweep.”

8. It’s well known that in Victorian times, small children were used to clean chimneys by climbing up them. They were usually boys, but it wasn’t unknown for girls to be used as well. The children were typically between the ages of 6 and 12 when they worked as “chimney sweeps' apprentices”, or in reality indentured servants to master chimney sweeps. Some of them were obtained from orphanages; others were sold to the chimney sweeps by their parents for prices ranging from 7 shillings to 4 guineas. Once his seven-year-long apprenticeship was completed he could become a journeyman sweep, and work for a master sweep of his choice. Aside from cleaning the chimneys their jobs might include roaming the streets calling out "Soot -Oh, Sweep" or another cry to let people know they were around.

9. Conditions were appalling. We already know they only got one day off per year. They were rarely allowed to bathe and often slept on sooty sacks and so many of them got cancer from exposure to soot. It wasn’t uncommon for a child to get stuck in the chimney and either suffocate or burn to death if the chimney was on fire. The master sweep might send another kid up to help but that child could easily end up suffering the same fate. If they were too slow, the master might light a Fire in the grate to speed them up which is where the expression “to light a fire under someone” came from.

10. Some sweeps used Geese rather than children, by tying a rope round the bird’s neck and forcing it to fly up the chimney. From about 1803, machines to sweep chimneys began to appear but sweeps and their clients preferred to abuse children than use one of the new-fangled contraptions. Eventually, Lord Shaftesbury spearheaded a campaign to stop children from being used this way and an act of Parliament put an end to it in 1875.

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle

30 April: International Walk Day

Today is International Walk Day, so here are some quotes about walking:

1. If we walk far enough, we shall sometime come to someplace. L Frank Baum

2. Everywhere is within walking distance... if you have the time. Steven Wright

3. Walking is not a lost art – one must, by some means, get to the car. Euan Esar

4. No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning. Cyril Connolly

5. An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day. Henry David Thoreau

6. All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking. Friedrich Nietsche

7. Walking is the ultimate travel adventure. You never know where your feet will take you. Richard A. Schmidt

8. If you are in a bad mood, go for a walk. If you are still in a bad mood, go for another walk. Hippocrates

9. If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside. Elizabeth von Arnim

10. I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. Noel Coward

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle

29 April: Horoscopes

In 410 BC The first known horoscope was devoted to someone born on this date. 10 things you might not know about horoscopes:

1. For the most part, the origins of horoscopes are lost in the mists of time, but most people believe astrology originated in the ancient Babylonian empire. A few scholars suggest it might have been Ancient Egyptians who cast the first horoscopes.

2. The origin of the word is the Latin word horoscopus which translates as "observer of the hour”.

3. The noun horoscopy for "casting of horoscopes" has been in use since the 17th century.

4. The individual who was the subject of this first known horoscope was the son of Shumu-usur, Shumu-iddina. It states: “At that time the Moon was below the Pincer of the Scorpion, Jupiter in Pisces, Venus in Taurus, Saturn in Cancer, Mars in Gemini. Mercury, which had set was not visible. Things will be propitious for you.”

5. So what about the horoscopes in the Newspapers? These date back to around the 1930s and the first one is credited to a man named R.H. Naylor. He was the assistant to an astrologer called Cheiro (real name William Warner) who was famous for casting celebrity horoscopes and reading palms. Mark Twain, Grover Cleveland, and Winston Churchill had all been his subjects. In August 1930 the Sunday Express wanted Cheiro to cast a horoscope for the newest royal baby of the time, Princess Margaret. He wasn’t available, as it happened, and so Naylor stepped in. The British public liked the princess’s horoscope and so the paper asked Naylor for more predictions.

6. Soon after, one of his articles predicted that “a British aircraft will be in danger” between October 8 and 15. A British airship crashed outside Paris on October 5, killing 48 of the 54 people on board, and people took it as evidence that Naylor really know what he was talking about. The editor of the paper offered Naylor a weekly column.

7. At first, it consisted of predictions for people whose birthdays fell during the week, but the editor in due course decided he wanted something that would appeal to more people. By 1937, the horoscope as we would recognise it today, using sun signs, had become a regular feature.

8. Astrologer Jonathan Cainer called it a “vast over-simplification of a noble, ancient art,” although it has to be said that as the author of the horoscopes in the Daily Mail he’s not done too badly out of it. He mainly criticised the columns which weren’t written by astrologers but by writers who were told by their editors to read a book on Astrology and get on with it.

9. How come horoscopes in newspapers and magazines have lasted so long? Readers like them, and will read them simply because they are there. In fact, readers have been known to react badly to horoscopes being dropped, or even moved to a different section of the paper.

10. Studies have shown that between 12% and 23% of Americans read their horoscope every day and 32% admit to doing so occasionally. Margaret Hamilton, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin found that people are more likely to believe favourable horoscopes.

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle

28 April: Terry Pratchett

This date in 1948 saw the birth of the writer Terry Pratchett. Here are ten facts about him:

1. He was born in Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. His parents were called David and Eileen. He was an only child, and often wrote characters who had no siblings, either. "In fiction, only-children are the interesting ones," he said.

2. He wrote his first published story at the age of 13, as a school assignment. It was called Business Rivals and was about the Devil hiring an ad agency to help lure tourists to Hell. His teacher was very impressed and had it published in the school magazine. A year later, Pratchett did some more work on it and submitted it to Science Fantasy magazine under the title The Hades Business. The editor commented that it was better written than 75% of the stories submitted and accepted it. Pratchett was paid £14 for the story and used the money to buy a Typewriter.

3. He left school at 17. As an A level student, he had his eye on what he might do after and wrote to a local paper asking if there might be a job for him when he finished school. The editor replied that he wanted a trainee reporter right away so Pratchett dropped out of school to take the job.

4. One of his tasks was to write a column consisting of a serialised children’s story. This column would become his first novel, Tales of the Carpet People, published in 1971. The book launch was held in the carpet department of a London furniture shop.

5. As a child, he wanted to be an astronomer. He collected Brooke Bond tea cards about space and owned a Telescope, but wasn’t good enough at maths to follow that path. Nevertheless, it was always one of his interests and as an adult, he built an observatory in his garden.

6. Most of the time his novels didn’t have chapters, because “life does not happen in regular chapters, nor do movies, and Homer did not write in chapters.” Only a couple of his childrens’ books were divided into chapters.

7. Things named after him include an Asteroid (127005 Pratchett) and a fossil sea-turtle from the Eocene epoch of New Zealand (Psephophorus terrypratchetti). His books almost inspired the name of a chemical element. In 2016, Pratchett fans petitioned the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry to name chemical element 117 octarine with the proposed symbol Oc (pronounced "ook"). However, the society went with tennessine, symbol Ts.

8. When he was knighted in 2009 for services to literature, he made himself a ceremonial sword for the ceremony. He and a friend dug up 178 pounds of Iron ore from a deposit near the author’s home in Wiltshire, added some fragments of a Meteorite, smelted it in a homemade kiln, and hammered the metal into bars. Pratchett commissioned a local blacksmith to fashion the material into a blade and decorate it with silverwork. He would later adopt a coat of arms which included a morpork Owl and the motto Noli Timere Messorem (Don't fear the reaper).

9. He owned a greenhouse full of carnivorous plants. He described them as "not as interesting as people think".

10. In 2007, he was diagnosed with a severe form of Alzheimer’s, posterior cortical atrophy. He referred to the diagnosis as "the great embuggerance." He carried on writing for as long as he could, and stated he wanted to die by assisted suicide, or assisted death as he preferred to call it before he became completely helpless. However, when he died at the age of 66 from complications of the disease, it was a natural death. His computer hard drive contained as many as 10 unfinished novels at the time of his death, but it was Pratchett’s wish that these be destroyed, and they were. His hard drive was smashed by a steam roller, and run through a stone crusher just to make sure. The tweet announcing his death read: “At last, Sir Terry, we must walk together. Terry took Death's arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night. The End.”

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle

27 April: Mary Wollstonecraft quotes:

27 April 1759 is the birthdate of Mary Wollstonecraft, writer, philosopher, and feminist; the mother of Mary Shelley. Here are 10 quotes from her:

1. I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.

2. The beginning is always today.

3. No man chooses evil because it's evil. He only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

4. The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on.

5. We never do any thing well, unless we love it for its own sake.

6. People thinking for themselves have more energy in their voice, than any government, which it is possible for human wisdom to invent; and every government not aware of this sacred truth will, at some period, be suddenly overturned.

7. Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.

8. Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

9. But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!

10. A war, or any wild-goose chase, is, as the vulgar use the phrase, a lucky turn-up of patronage for the minister, whose chief merit is the art of keeping himself in place.

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle

26 April: Alien

Today is Alien day. So here are ten things you might not know about Alien, the 1979 science fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O'Bannon:

1. Working titles for the film included "They Bite" and "Star Beast". It was when Dan O'Bannon was re-reading the script that he noticed the number of times the word “alien” appeared and decided that would make a much better title.

2. In the early drafts, Ripley was written as a man, which meant this was one of three films in which Sigourney Weaver played a character originally planned to be male. (The others were The TV Set and Vantage Point.) Ripley might have been played by Meryl Streep, as after auditions narrowed it down to those two. However, Streep’s partner died about that time so Weaver ended up with the role because Streep was in mourning.

3. Harrison Ford turned down the role of Captain Dallas.

4. The ship’s Cat, Jones, is played by four different felines. On the first day of filming, Sigourney Weaver’s skin started playing up, leading her to fear she might be allergic to cats; but it turned out she was allergic to the glycerin sprayed on her skin to make her look hot and sweaty. If you’re wondering how they got the cat to hiss at the alien, the crew had a German Shepherd Dog hidden behind a screen, and the cat was reacting to that.

5. The set must have been pretty smelly at times because some of the props were quite disgusting. The dead facehugger that Ash autopsies was made from fresh shellfish, four Oysters, and a sheep Kidney; the inside of the alien eggs contained fresh cattle hearts and stomachs obtained from a local butcher. The "egg tube" of the facehugger was Sheep intestine. After trying several options the crew decided organic material was best for the wet and gooey look they were aiming for. That said, the slime used on the Alien was K-Y jelly.

6. The Blue laser lights used in the alien ship's egg chamber were borrowed from The Who. The band was testing out the lasers for their stage show in the soundstage next door.

7. The original name for the spaceship was "Snark", then "Leviathan", before they finally settled on "Nostromo".

8. The musical score was composed by Jerry Goldsmith, conducted by Lionel Newman, and performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra.

9. At the end of the film, wait for the credits, turn the volume up, and you can hear the sound of a pod opening.

10. At Paisley Abbey there is a gargoyle bearing a striking resemblance to the xenomorph, the alien creature in the film. A stonemason hired to restore the ancient, crumbling gargoyles in the 1990s included it.

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle

25 April: Walter de la Mare

On this date in 1873 the writer Walter de la Mare was born in Greenwich. He is probably best remembered for his works for children, for his poem The Listeners. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. He was descended from a family of French Huguenot silk merchants on his father’s side and the Scottish naval surgeon and author, Dr Colin Arrott Browning on his mother’s. He is not any relation to the poet Robert Browning.

2. He disliked the name Walter and preferred to be known to his family and friends as “Jack”.

3. He worked from 1890 to 1908 in the statistics department of the London office of Standard Oil. While he was there he began writing in his spare time, and eventually left when Sir Henry Newbolt arranged for him to get a Civil List pension, allowing him to write full time.

4. His first published short story, Kismet, appeared in the journal Sketch in 1895.

5. His collection of poetry, Songs of Childhood, was published in 1902.

6. While he’s probably best known for children’s poems, there was more to his writing career than that. He’s also known for his ghost stories, of which HP Lovecraft was a big fan. As well as a number of short stories, De la Mare wrote two supernatural novels, Henry Brocken (1904) and The Return (1910).

7. Richard Adams was also a fan and used several of de la Mare's poems as epigraphs in Watership Down.

8. He met his wife, Elfrida Ingpen, at the Esperanza Amateur Dramatics Club. She was ten years older than him.

9. He believed that all children are visionaries, starting life in possession of a “childlike imagination” but at some point the influence of the external world causes the childlike imagination to retreat “like a shocked Snail into its shell". It’s replaced by what he called a “boylike imagination” which is more logical and analytical. However, in the case of some, the childlike imagination grows bolder and able to face the world, and that is when you get artistic and intuitive people.

10. He died in 1956 of a coronary thrombosis. His ashes are buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, where he had once been a choirboy.

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle

24 April: The Trojan Horse

This date in 1184 BC is the traditional date when the Greeks presented Troy with a giant wooden Horse. 10 things you might not know about the Trojan war and the Trojan horse:

1. The Trojan War is a legendary conflict that took place between the ancient Greeks and the city of Troy. The inciting incident is said to be the abduction of Helen, the wife of Menelaus, by Paris, a prince of Troy. The war rumbled on for ten years before the Trojan horse incident.

2. We know about this war because the story is told in the epic poems “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” attributed to Homer. There have been numerous translations of the story by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Louis MacNeice and many more.

3. Did this war really happen or was it an epic tale Homer made up? Respected historians of the past, such as Herodotus, the so-called ‘Father of History’, and Eratosthenes, a mathematician, certainly thought so and came up with actual dates for it. Writings from other places, including Egypt, mention this war as well. It has also been said that the graphic descriptions in Homer’s works suggest he must have been there and seen it happen. All that said, modern scholars are a little more sceptical. They’d say there probably was a war, but Homer exaggerated it and added some mythic embellishments.

4. Perhaps the horse wasn’t a gift at all, or even a horse, but a siege engine. The classical poets, it has been suggested, misunderstood what they were seeing. The fact that military machinery is sometimes named after animals, or that siege engines were sometimes covered with wet horse hides to protect them against flaming arrows might have led to this misunderstanding.

5. The Trojan horse was a strategy thought up by the Greeks to end the war once and for all. They built a massive wooden horse and left it outside the gates of Troy. Then they pretended to sail away as if they’d conceded defeat and left the horse as a peace offering. However, hidden inside the horse were soldiers who, late at night, opened the gates and let in the Greek army, who’d quietly sailed back again.

6. The horse was said to be about 30 meters (98 feet) tall. It was intricately carved and must have taken considerable time and effort.

7. Stories differ in terms of how many soldiers were actually inside, from a handful to about forty. These soldiers included famous figures like Odysseus, Menelaus, and Ajax.

8. The Trojans saw the horse as a symbol of victory and a religious offering. It’s possible that a spy named Sinon helped convince them it would bring good fortune if they brought it inside.

9. Not everyone believed it, however. A Trojan priest called Laocoön suspected treachery and famously said, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” the Trojans ignored his advice.

10. The term Trojan horse has entered the modern vernacular as a cautionary tale about being aware of possible deception. A malicious computer program that tricks users into running it is called a "Trojan horse".

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle

23 April: English Language Day

Today is English Language Day. 10 things you might not know about the English language:

1. English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family. People who speak it are called Anglophones. The name comes from the Angles, ancient Germanic peoples who migrated to the island of Great Britain. While English has a lot of words it has “borrowed” from other languages, most of the core vocabulary and the first words learned by children are mainly Germanic words from Old English. In fact, it is not possible to speak or write English without using any of these words.

2. How many words are there in the English language? A tricky question as words are constantly being added at a rate of something like 14 new words a day, or one every 98 minutes. A group of people called The Global Language Monitor have taken it upon themselves to keep track of how many words there are in English. On 10 June 2009 they announced the 1,000,000th word. (It was “Web 2.0” meaning the second generation of the Internet.) And it goes on. An English dictionary from 1989 has about 170,000 words, 220,000 if obsolete words are included. The average English speaker only knows about 40,000 of them. Over 1,500 of them were invented by William Shakespeare.

3. English is the most spoken language in the world thanks to the British Empire’s influence. It’s the third most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. However, it’s estimated that there are more people who’ve learned English as a second language than there are native speakers.

4. There are some jobs for which a reasonable command of English is a requirement. It’s the language used in aviation so airline pilots must be able to speak it and understand it well enough over a radio with interference. They are required to take a proficiency test which includes aviation terminology. Also scientists would find English pretty useful as over 80% of published scientific papers are in English.

5. English is an official language in 59 countries including India, Ireland, and Canada. It isn’t, however, an official language in the USA or the United Kingdom, because it’s the dominant language for historical reasons and it’s never been deemed necessary to define it as such. It’s also a co-official language of the United Nations, The EU, and many other international and regional organisations.

6. It’s often said that the English word with the most definitions is “set”. This was certainly the case in 1928 when the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. “Set” had 430 definitions and took up several pages in the dictionary. More recently, Set’s crown has been stolen by “Run”, probably due to technology, for example, running a computer programme or trains running on time.

7. There is a word for words that are used which don’t add meaning to a sentence, ie. words such as “like”, “actually,” “honestly,” and “basically”. No, the answer is not “annoying”! The technical term is “crutch words”.

8. Many other languages have genders for objects, French and German for example. English only uses genders when talking about people (or possibly animals or ships). However, in the olden days, English used genders in the same way other languages do. However, when the Vikings invaded and brought their language with them, the genders of many nouns differed from the Anglo-Saxon ones, so it’s theorised that people stopped using them to avoid confusion.

9. English can be a tricky language to learn, what with words which can mean the opposite of each other (eg “cleave” and “overlook”). Pronunciation isn’t always straightforward, either. The combination “ough” can be pronounced in 10 different ways, as in this sentence: “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”

10. It used to be even more complicated as the English alphabet used to have more letters, including ‘thorn’, a letter written like a p, but pronounced ‘th’. Also there was a ‘yogh’, pronounced as ‘ch’ in Middle English; and the long S that looks much like the letter F you often see in inscriptions in churches.

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle

22 April: Immanuel Kant

This date in 1724 was the birthdate of Immanuel Kant, German philosopher. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. He was born in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He was the fourth of nine children, and the eldest to survive. He came from a line of saddlers – his father and both his grandfathers were in the saddlery business.

2. His parents gave him the name Emmanuel, but after learning Hebrew, he changed it to Immanuel.

3. The family were part of the Pietist movement, a branch of the Lutheran church. They believed in striving for piety and morality, and in hard work. Their paster’s influence allowed Immanuel to study at the best school in town, the Friedrich College. The school day began at 6am, six days a week, and prayers were said before every lesson. They studied Latin, theology, mathematics, music, Greek, French, Polish and Hebrew. There were no holidays and the only day off was Sunday. No natural sciences were taught, though. Kant only learned those once he was at university.

4. It seems he soon caught up in physics and astronomy, though. He theorised that the Solar System was condensed from a single cloud of gas, that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin, and that the Milky Way was a large disc of stars. We now know the latter theory was correct.

5. Kant never travelled more than sixty miles from his birthplace. He declined an invitation to become a professor in Berlin because he didn’t feel his health was up to it.

6. When his father died in 1746, he had to drop out of university and work as a tutor in order to make ends meet and support his family. He taught many subjects including Mathematics, Physics, philosophy and physical geography, but was never well off.

7. He never married and it’s likely he died a virgin. It seems he had little to do with women, even the sisters he was supporting financially. He never visited them, and when one of them dropped by his house when he had guests, he apologised for her bad manners.

8. In his later years, Kant kept such a strictly ordered routine that his neighbours could set their Clocks by his daily walks.

9. His health was never good. He suffered from deformities of the shoulders and chest and his head was too large. He took many drugs to alleviate his problems but they tended to make things worse. One of his self-medications was to drink half a bottle of red Wine every evening.

10. He died on February 12, 1804 aged 79. His last words were “Es ist gut” (It is good).

New!!!

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

Get it in paperback

Get it for your kindle