Paul's Art World

NEW ENQUIRIES DAILY 2026

2026-10-07T06:12:01.335-07:00

In order of composition, newest at the top.

Photographs from Ashurst, New Forest unless indicated otherwise

There’s just no getting

In front of this peacock

Perhaps it’s the bird

with two backs?

How can a passage

be a boundary?

It’s evident

they’re taking the piss.

(Shoreditch, London)

Up to a point…

Something tells me

that sheltering in your own shadow

can never be more than a partial solution.

Michaelmas is here again!

Or might be,

if I knew when it was.

Or are the daisies early?

29.9.26. Google reveals that the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, known as Michaelmas, is celebrated on 29 September to mark the end of the harvest, the start of autumn, and shorter daylight hours. Without knowing it, I was spot on! Michaelmas daisies (Aster) can bloom anytime from August onwards through to November, but should be at their peak by late September.

Who’d have thought it?

Traffic lights ahead,

though something stops them

showing their colours all at once.

(Islington, London)

‘Anytime’ turns out to be

seven to nine.

I suppose ‘58% of the time fitness'

doesn't have quite the same ring.

(Islington, London)

Hydrangea macrophylla’s flowers

are famously blue in acidic soil,

pink in alkaline.

So what the blooming heck’s going on here?

(It’s not that a bigleaf hydrangea’s soil can vary so locally, but that this is an AI-generated image!)

The cows round here

are remarkably disciplined.

You won't catch them out of alignment,

let alone walking in circles.

(Burley)

What might seem monumental

can’t be. It’s just fallen out of

an unmonumental holding place:

my tooth.

Suppose you land in a foreign world

like autumn sprigs on gravel…

What should your tactics be,

assertion or integration?

(Rushington)

Cometh the new fridge

bound in its box,

cometh the collateral

from the cutting of its bonds.

I think this means

I should walk this way:

I’ll pop my yellow legs on

and begin.

(Rushington)

Looks like Steph

has sourced the sauce

big time. All I had to do

was saucer it.

I'm not sure I've ever seen

a single seater bench before.

I'm not even sure

it can count as a bench…

(Hampstead, London)

The advantage of a unicycle

is who's going to steal it?

The problem’s if it wasn’t one

and half the duo’s gone.

(Hampstead, London)

I imagine they find it

hard to resist complaints

even when they’re 99.99%

in the right.

(Hampstead, London)

It’s not a pretty sight

when a post box bleeds out.

I just hope

they weren’t love letters.

(Hampstead, London)

Only when I saw the photo

did it occur to me to ask:

is that a cloud gap

or am I waving a sky blue flag?

(Yuki Miyake’s photo of Steph and me)

Flexible efficiency

sounds a sound guide to action:

I love to use a rubber spoon

to scrape up the overage.

The feather crop is good today

all wood pigeon, I believe,

they being nervous types

who drop them like hats.

So this is where the apples are

trying their best to look like Brussels sprouts…

Raising the question: if they were actually Brussels sprouts

would they be trying to look like apples?

(Totton)

The granite sparkle

of the sunlit sea

would disappear soon enough

if you chucked a rock in.

(Bexhill)

Look out birds!

A pair of cat’s-ears lying low

suggest an enemy’s crouched down there

waiting for a chance.

(Hypochoeris radicata, commonly known as cat's-ear or false dandelion - or possibly dandelions, which I'll call false cat's ear)

Never mind

where she’s going,

if they don’t make them like her

where has she come from?

(Camden, London)

I found the fly!

Or did it find itself?

Either way, the buzzer seems

quite brazenly at home!

As rebellions go

graffiti is just too conventional for me.

Perhaps if you sprayed it

on perforated walls…

(Southampton)

I’m curious

What’s in the tank beyond the blue

that flows, I assume,

along the straw the cone is drinking through?

(Mayfair, London)

Just as I was relishing

how those those glossy red trousers

matched the car’s colour,

I spotted that they didn’t exist.

(Mayfair, London)

Fuck! Yet somehow not

because the midnight tongue-of-yoghurt-trick

won't get any better than this,

stuck out at the anti-migrant mob!

7 Sept 2026: Hampshire is in the national news tonight, as the arrival of a boat with 140 asylum-seekers on board at Eastney Marina, Portsmouth, sparked clashes between anti-migrant protesters and riot police.

Yes, I typed ‘lateral’

but I literally meant ‘literal’,

was trying to come at things directly,

not sneak around the side.

Like two in a pod?

I dare say, but there are ten septillion atoms

in the average garden pea.

What are the chances of them being arranged the same?

Ten septillion is quite a big number: written out in full, there are 25 zeros, and that 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 can also be expressed as ten trillion trillion.

I suppose I should expect to find

the occasional dog

has vomited

in what is, after all, a dog-walker’s park…

(Ashurst & Colbury Recreation Ground... Except that is actually Fuligo septica, commonly known as the dog vomit slime mould. The initial phase of this amoebozoan protist is a bright yellow, spongy, cushion-like mass that resembles scrambled eggs or… dog vomit.)

There's just no way

so many saplings can make sense:

that much competition

is beyond an oak.

(2025 was a mast year, and spring conditions were favourable in 2026 - I've never seen so many potential oaks giving it a go.)

I ran my tongue

across my lips

to think how moist the thought had made me

even as I blushed…

Fungus Face

looks jaundiced

as if even the plasmodial world,

doesn’t find age quite enough.

(Slime moulds live about two months)

I'm trying to see the flag in the park

as more history than assertion.

I’m not there yet,

but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try.

I’ve only one rule

about laying these

out

but if you're not careful, such a lack of constraint can take you to some rather strange places.

Why did Dali never paint a llama

turning paranoiac-criticality into something Tibetan?

He left the field open

to a rather corny T-shirt.

(Salvador Dali painted many animals, but never a llama. During most of Dali’s life (1904-89) the Dalai Lama lived in Tibet – he fled to India in 1959 to escape the incoming Chinese. The ‘paranoiac-critical method’ was the surrealist driver behind Dali’s most famous double images.)

I’m bringing up bile

Steph doesn’t like the sound of that, not to mention the smell.

Steph has tinnitus,

and I don’t like the sound of that.

‘Purple as a cauliflower’

is not a phrase

that came to mind

before we bought this.

Odd how flies

despite their name

would sooner but up against closed glass

then fly through an open window.

You can hardly deny

climate change

when your caravan drowns

under waves of eclipses.

(13 Aug 2026 saw a 95% eclipse of the sun in the UK. Photo by Ruth Fuller)

It comes to something

when I’m surprised to see

a bank of clouds

backing up a pigeon.

(July-August 2026 locally saw no rain at all, just record heatwaves. And no precipitation came with these rare clouds)

Should you see

a sunflower

in need of extra petals,

I have a few here.

It's a brave feather

that nestles in holly

or tickles a nettle

under the stings.

Those unused band names…

Stroking Snakes, The Furious Plantains,

Sick Meow, Landscape Sweeping,

Bevelled Edges, Elastoplastered, The Y's.

(Internet image. Those seven are drawn from a shortlist of twelve: an online check revealed that my other five possibilities - The Avocados, Noodle Soup, Mist, The Burners and Naked Gravy – had actually been used by real bands! Not sure if that makes me retro-prescient or unimaginative...)

This raises the question

If you rode your dog,

would you not have

to pick up its poop?

(Mayfair, London)

Death to every

stinging nettle!

Sometimes empathy

isn't my strongest suit.

How good to see

the bindweed’s flower

so at home

among foreign leaves.

Here are the finalists

in the contest for our finest petunia.

Even those were probably superfluous words,

let alone these.

Strange how distinctive

the dapple can appear,

when its essence lies

in being neither one thing nor the other.

‘What’, I wondered, ‘is with this

Lego soap?’ Then spotted

I had the non-slip side

the wrong way up.

(Apartment in Belfast)

I think I saw her

at a distance

from the back, admittedly,

but thought you ought to know...

(Belfast)

It can’t be easy

moving fruit that size around,

fearful of the terminal

crush of a punnet.

(Belfast)

The good news is

the spatter pattern indicates

that no-one can have been sitting on this seat

when the spraying occurred.

(Belfast)

The introverted seats

are empty, I see:

whereas, out of shot,

the outgoing chairs are well sat-on.

(Southampton Airport)

When it comes to streetlights

fail-on is preferred to fail-off.

But what’s the best scenario

for penises?

I don't doubt

the potential existence of other worlds,

the problem being –

we seem to be stuck in this one.

(‘Another World Is Possible’, Mark Titchner, 2012 - a permanent commission off Southwark Street, London)

Death throes

can rather become a flower –

people have a harder time

of looking good when withered.

Two million –

four million now I think of it –

is a lot of boots. All said and done

the pavement’s wearing well.

(Southampton)

It all depends

what you mean by accessible.

I was hoping it meant

that I could get in.

(Southampton Railway Station)

It looks as if

a predator

has been making omelettes

on our lawn.

Good to see that

not only did they plan the build to fit the treescape,

they correctly predicted future growth

in order to make the most of it.

(Southampton)

Having three speed settings

presents as a choice,

but whoever opts

for 1 or 2?

(Images are of an electric toothbrush, a vibrator, and an electric toothbrush with vibrator attachment - the Celebrator Toothbrush Vibrator Incognito)

Formal trousers

have their place,

but summer legs

are what you want in summer.

(London: my crossed legs on the tube)

It's so very

hot today

even the buildings

need cooling off…

SUITSUPPLY are lucky

I’m not a graffitist:

It would be so tempting

To make that ‘U’ an ‘H’.

(Mayfair, London)

I happened to hear him

trying to pick her up:

I couldn't blame him for trying,

nor her for saying ‘no’.

(Tottenham Court Road, London)

That this pavement is uneven

is of limited concern.

Not many are likely to trip

through failing to spot it.

(Hoxton, London)

This magazine

has been in this loo for over a year,

so reinforcing its USP

of covering old news in new depth.

(Southampton)

Sweet!

The way the chestnut catkins

rastafarianise the pavement

with clumps of blonde dreadlocks.

(Sweet chestnut catkins in Shoreditch, London)

I’ve no idea

what sort of business lies behind here,

but that old woman is rather convincing

as a younger man.

At first I thought

‘This really ought to be an optician’.

There again,

does Boots sell footwear?

(Twickenham, London)

Is it wrong to prop a door open

if the floor is wet?

Or worse to warn of moisture

if the floor is dry?

(Schafer House, Euston, London)

The party is over

for this sad dog

rapidly reverting

to balloondom.

Five coaches?

Good.

I wouldn't want a cancelled train

to be short of full capacity, too.

(Highbury & Islington station)

Whatever time the train was due

it looks like I've missed it -

the time, that is,

who knows about the train?

(Winchester Railway Station)

Am I old enough

to be allowed

to ride a trolley?

Let’s hope so.

(Basel)

The lonely suitcase

pink and vulnerable

that no-one wants

might be just perfect for a bomb.

(Basel)

I thought a few photos

from one of the admirable trams

might point to the nature of people in Basel –

but no, they seem perfectly ordinary.

(Basel)

So it goes…

some trees are taller

than buildings, some buildings

are taller than trees.

(Basel)

This flower

might not grow in the water

but growing beside it

could be enough.

How does a window

negate a shadow?

I'm still trying

to work that out...

(Basel)

What’s up with the Swiss?

I don't recall the British

having to be warned

against such behaviour.

(Kunstmuseum, Basel)

I wouldn’t like to meet that pipe

in the undergrowth

by night

when it is hungry.

(Basel)

Good idea!

It's bad for men as well as women…

Yet what to hit it with, and where,

still stand as tricky questions.

(Basel)

I can see why these fish

would be happy to swim between floors.

My question is:

how did they get there?

(Basel)

Who'd have guessed

that Basel fish could leap so high?

Now I'm starting

to understand…

(Basel - Wille Hege: Spingeder Fisch, 1940)

I think there can be something

corrugated about a thought.

You may think not,

but doesn't my thought verify itself?

Let us hear it

for the lettuce as -

if not quite a flower -

a seriously vase-worthy leaf.

(Bedford)

I remember

when this was a cricket ground

and the whip in question

was of the ball to the fine leg boundary...

(Hastings: the statue is ‘The Spirit of Cricket’ by Allan Sly, unveiled in 1997 to mark the history of the Priory Cricket Ground, now turned into a shopping centre)

One of these days

I'll find a Crescent with crescent-shaped

wear-away or chip-off

but this not-at-all is as close as I've got.

(St Leonards-on-Sea)

Has Betty put

the rubbish out yet?

I don't know why we stick with her

when she always seems to forget.

(The 1930's cartoon character Betty Boop in St Leonards-on-Sea)

So far as I know

everyone is lucky

by this definition.

Why buck the trend?

(Hastings)

Does the Dolphin Inn

have dolphin in?

Or is it just usual

cod and haddock?

(Hastings)

Knowing that we need pollinators

I fished out this flailing bee.

I did not bother

with the fly.

(St Leonards-on-Sea)

The only type of telephone conversation

people have these days

is talking with,

not through, their phones.

(From online search after seeing a similar sight in a café)

That was Polegate...

The stop off for travel from Warsaw to London

or a gate made of poles

rather than for letting them through?

(I seem to have got the wrong end of the pole here: in fact, the name originates from Old English and translates to ‘the gateway to the polder' - that is, to reclaimed marshland.)

What is this ‘strang’?

A strange new word,

or simply the usual

unwilling to go with an unstrange spelling?

(Islington, London)

Her real name

is, of course, Plentiya Pain:

she kneads the flesh with fulsome force

again and again.

(Islington, London)

What does it mean

when the repair takes longer

than the infrastructure

for making it can last?

(Islington, London)

Surely ‘my place’ is correct?

I may not be Islington-posh

but on the grounds of grammar and spacing,

I wouldn't send my children here.

(Islington, London)

Mass wisteria

is surely a disproportionate

reaction

to the arrival of a pun.

Time works

slowly round about here,

150 years having led

to no discernible differentiation.

(still-similar architectural features in Southwark, London)

It scares me to think

how often I’ve sat on a chair

with no real regard

for the dangers involved.

(Tate Modern, London)

He's selling shoes

yet wearing none himself.

Perhaps he’s dealing in

his personal stock.

(Street Market, Nine Elms, London)

This display would surely benefit

from a consultant with experience

of retail design. But I can’t see the trader,

and so cannot suggest it.

(Street Market, Nine Elms, London)

Here’s the card I sent to Steph

to celebrate the day –

which I invented –

that celebrates the sending of cards.

My bronze clock

may be right just twice a day

but doesn’t that make

those moments more precious?

(Joan Miró: L'Horloge du vent /The Wind Clock, 1967)

No shortage

Of bags in Basingstoke

You need to go to Bournemouth

If you want boxes.

(from Southampton-Waterloo train, moving at the time...)

Happy Mouse!

I haven't left you behind even once

since I started carrying

a spare in my suitcase.

These are sadly unrepeatable

points of pure potential,

roses having never yet acquired

the umbrella’s trick of furling.

(Roche Court, Wiltshire)

Anyone for pseudo-tennis?

That’s probably close

to the limit of the game

as playable here.

(court at Roche Court, Wiltshire)

It’s time the bees moved on

to scout a new home:

I hear there’s a highly suitable

cello near here.

(Roche Court, Wiltshire – this is Bill Woodrow’s ‘Clockswarm’, 2001: not far away in the grounds is his much larger ‘Celloswarm’, 2002)

’m not so sure a gardener

should

be left to enjoy

his shed as he wishes…

(Roche Court, Wiltshire)

Where exactly are we

in the global warming seasons?

Is green turning yellow

or yellow turning green?

(Roche Court, Wiltshire)

At last!

It's high time London

got its arse in gear

to tackle the green agenda.

(Mayfair, London)

‘Are those lips or leaves?’

I wonder, relishing

the chance to kiss

the green or red dichotomy goodbye.

(Paul Smith, Mayfair)

Don't tell me

that you're going to tell me

not to wear

my favorite trainers anymore.

(Copperfield Gallery, London: one of six trainers in Oscar Santillán's 1'111,111, 2023, for which he worked with scientists to artificially accelerate the ageing process in a sequence - this is the fifth 'oldest'.)

Not to have noticed

you’ve lost your head

suggests you didn’t

have one in the first place.

(Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

By way of observation

rather than as fantasy,

this looks like a painting

in which she would be naked.

(Worcester College, Oxford: it’s hard work being a student these days)

Are these roses

the cocker spaniel

of flower displays,

ready for a walk?

(Somerset House, London)

The plucking tub

is full of mare’s tail.

How come the garden’s

even fuller?

I see this store is taking full advantage

of the law allowing shops

of under 280 square metres

to open every hour of Sundays.

(Southampton)

Is it strictly

camera for camera

or can I update my life

by exchanging my camera for a phone?

(Oxford)

I admire her calm

It’s almost as if

there wasn’t a giant centipede

crawling up her arm…

(London-Reading train)

No longer paved with gold, perhaps

but Mayfair pavements

seem valuable enough

to justify overshoes.

My favourite flower has relocated

as always feared it would.

I'll do my best but I suspect

its prospects are not good.

(Clematis in the back yard)

I admit to confusion

matters used to be clearer.

But then gender

used to be clearer, too.

Somerset House, London

Don't blame me

if your bins get split up

and returned to numbers

1, 4 and 7.

(147 Bounds Green Road, London)

I’ve rarely seen a man

in such a red and black context

I hope he supports

an appropriately-coloured football team.

(Bounds Green, London - that team would be Bournemouth, I guess)

It's when the help

takes the form of lay-offs

that you may need to turn

to Nuromol.

(Bounds Green underground station, London)

It wasn't the scrunch-up

that set me off,

but the fake spill which I took to be

a nicer coincidence than I could have arranged

(Bounds Green, London)

This may not be Freud’s rose

but it is in his garden,

its tattered blowsiness

revealing a vulval id.

(Freud Museum, Hampstead, London)

What goes in

to a Freudian bin?

The dream of being thrown away

in a paper you appear in?

(Outside the Freud Museum, Hampstead, London)

I followed this steep hill

a mile or so down

into High Barnet,

wondering how low the main Barnet gets.

This is a matter of context

Do we need to know

what a gate looks like

when we're standing in front of one?

(Lancaster Gate, London)

Poets beware!

The moon is too clichéd.

But does having six – as with lovers, or vodkas, or floors in a house –

take us far enough beyond?

I’d give you the answer,

were I not restricted to four lines.

(Nick Goss: ‘Six Moons’, 2026, at Josh Lilley Gallery, London. May 2026)

I've only just noticed

that the northern line goes further south than any other.

There is, of course, no southern line

to maximise the distance north.

Morden (on the Northern Line) is the southernmost station on the true tube, Cheshunt (on the Metropolitan Line) is the furthest north.

Being easily amused

I like to be the dying pensioner

striding up escalator with heavy case

past the standers stilled in health and youth.

(any underground escalator)

I’m very one, they’re everyone

according to my fingers

but that’s just my subconscious

failing to grasp the extent of their uniqueness.

I’m glad to be plaster

rather than flesh,

a fly having settled

in such a ticklish place.

(Palias des Vaches, Exbury)

Let’s hear it

for greed:

painting, ceramics and nature

all at once.

(Palias des Vaches, Exbury)

How hopeful it is

when the remnants of a tree

branch out as if determined

to carry on arboreally.

(Palias des Vaches car park, Exbury)

If fluffiness

is the measure of willow,

these pass the test so easily

they might just rival clouds.

The perfect triple

not-quite-chain of daisies

is rarer than you might expect.

Here, then, is a triple.

This sounded good

but when I got to the till

the assistant insisted

on charging the prices as marked.

(Camberwell, London)

I need to put

the washing machine on

and - given how hard that is to wear -

some of the clothes that aren’t yet in it.

(That is Helen Chadwick: In the Kitchen (Washing Machine), 1977)

This looks a bit dull

This is a bit dull. But I observe that the Victoria line

is 165 steps away if you turn right,

415 if you turn left.

(King’s Cross Underground Station, London. A particularly blatant bit of passenger-unfriendly traffic management. In general, you need to game the system on the tube.)

Take a seat,

seat!

Oh,

you have!

(Marylebone, London)

To take a seat

on a seat on a seat on a seat on a seat on a seat on a seat on a seat on a seat on a seat

may be to go

some seats too far.

(St James's, London)

What need five spares

if they are so reliable,

what need even one?

Or should I reason not the need?

(Mechanical Sprinkler Alarms made by 'Reliable'. as installed in Mayfair, London - and rather grandly referencing Shakespeare (King Lear, Act II, Scene 4))

This is how a gallery’s

stationery should be:

suitably sculptural,

even in the loo.

(South London Gallery)

In case of fire

my bag will burn,

but an empty fireplace

offers good protection.

(Phillida Reid Gallery, London)

It’s one thing to find

the perfect celandine,

another to catch it

in exactly the right light.

It looks as if

‘Overdraft’ has gone well bust.

Perhaps they took

too many loans themselves.

(Shirley, Southampton)

Are they that mean

to their customers?

Or is the shop itself weeping,

Convinced that it will never re-open?

(Shirley, Southampton: opening will reveal it as a charity shop run by Care and Relief for the Young (CRY), which sells donated goods to support children worldwide)

What the world needs

is the spirit of the fence:

support for the old,

regardless of condition.

I'm not sure plant onanism

is officially a thing,

but what else can you call it

if your issue gets no further than your leaves?

I take myself with me

wherever I go:

it gets a little boring,

but I seem to be stuck.

According to Google

this is a vintage horse-drawn land roller,

more likely to be decorative

than used to flatten the ground.

Look now!

For it may be but the one May week

that hawthorne anthers

sprinkle their corymbs with purple-red…

You need quite a building

to take on the sky

and, if not win, at least

make a creditable draw.

(Whitechapel, London)

Why is it

that only pink seems right

for maximum petal –

assuming you agree?

That this sign has slipped

is no surprise.

I wonder

that it doesn't happen more.

(London Bridge)

Hurry, hurry!

without at least a foot of blur

you’re hardly in

the human race.

(Liverpool Street station, London)

It’s the drink

that people come for:

I hear the conversation’s

a load of ox, wherever you steer it.

(Liverpool Street, London)

I'm not convinced

that that is this –

if anyone spiked it I didn't see -

but I'm certain that this is not that.

(Bermondsey, London)

The essence of a crow

is not the head:

they can, it seems,

fly perfectly well without one.

(Southwark Park, London)

Take care, daisy

as you stretch for the sun

not to get burned:

I advise some lotion and a hat.

How touching to see

this tree couple

still holding branches

after all their years together.

(Southampton)

How come things

get so fucked up?

When are they going

to fuck themselves down?

I see that

‘Nothing Stands Still For Long’

has closed already.

I might have expected time to move on....

(Workplace Gallery, London)

They came from outer space

then landed on a crash barrier,

but intact.

What was the logic in that?

That’s enough mail

to be going on with,

if not too much to open.

I suspect it’s time to move out.

(Fitzrovia, London)

What's the point,

one may wonder,

of a window in the floor?

Still best not to open it, just in case.

(Timothy Taylor Gallery, London)

It's only at commuter hubs

that you’ll find this many

pigeons lining up

in such an orderly manner.

(King’s Cross station, London)

It saddens me to think

how hard it must be for a pigeon

having to fly around

with only one wing.

(St James’s, London)

What's your preference

shadow, paint or actual leaves?

I can make the case

that none of them is real.

I wonder how many customers

have asked, straight-faced as possible,

if there's time to sink another

whisky on the rocks?

(Southampton)

Not only am I

in a long queue,

I've no idea

when the lights will change.

(Redbridge, Southampton)

I don’t know the role

of the dandeclipse

in floral astronomy or flower-rites.

I don’t even know how often it occurs.

Yes, of course

Flat metal sheets

are fed through a series of rollers.

How, though, do you corrugate a poem?

A cloud cloud forms

when a gap in the clouds

is more of a cloud

than the clouds themselves.

The ideal dandelion

isn't easily found:

you need synchronous buds and flowers

and a seed-head ready to spread the future round.

What hope is there

for genuine progress

if everything is what it is

because of how it used to be?

This is an emergency!

The fire engine’s

rushing off

in the wrong direction!

(Totton)

I guess that is

a fair instruction:

I shall pick it up again

before we reach the tipping top.

(Notting Hill Gate Underground, London)

Our time being now

sounds positive,

or is that because

we haven’t got much of a future?

(Trafalgar Square, London)

I doubt it, Jack

‘Always’ is such a strong word

when your mutual memories will die with you

and records of those won’t last longer than the Earth.

(Tottenham Court Road Underground, London)

The dual level pavement

is rare enough

to treat as a metaphor.

all I need to work out now’s: for what?

(Notting Hill, London)

This, however,

takes gradation far too far:

people should be

on the street or not.

(Islington, London)

If only

every bend in life

were this easy

to straighten out…

(Notting Hill, London)

Laugh?

She nearly slipped out of focus,

grateful, I suspect,

for the cover of her friend's handbag.

(Soho, London)

On to the green lights

Your brand new phone, settled bills, letters from your mother,

carp, trout and – size allowing – sharks, plus your current boyfriend’s favourite sweater,

pre-emptively for when he does become your ex.

(Waterloo – Southampton train)

Two seasons for the price of one

brings us to a petal-squelch

I’d sooner pick up on

than pick up.

Such fine berries are surely due

at least one drop of liquid extension

while I ponder what the difference is

between that being rain or dew....

(Southampton)

Why have

one hedge

when four

will do?

What's the word

when one tree sends its dead leaves

to live, you might say,

in the space of another?

(Serpentine Gardens, London)

Looking at how hard it looks

to build a tree and add so much attendant blossom

increases my admiration

for how smoothly Nature accomplishes the task.

(Serpentine Gardens, London)

Steph hasn’t yet sent

the letter we drafted to the Parish Council

requesting removal of the Union Jack, and it’s gone!

If not as we’d have wished…

(In April 2026 the Receation Ground’s Union Jack, flown since October, was replaced by a St George’s Cross which – being narrower in scope and previously less often flown – is the more strongly associated with Reform’s agenda.)

How to do a ‘to do’ list

Write down tasks already completed.

Tick them off.

You're done!

Has the crack trapped the catkins?

Or are the catkins seeking

a lower profile refuge

from the dog-walkers’ flattening feet?

I’d never seen a hedgehog

nor a red squirrel

in the park until now.

So the new playground will have to do.

(A new playground – funded by planning gain for the new housing estate the other side of the Recreation Ground - was installed in April 2026)

Thot’s hondy

I dan’t need a phune ar o phine

but wos wandering where

I might pick up onather phane…

(Eastbourne: who knows what letter has fallen, so‘a’ and ‘o’ swap places)

No letter is safe

when the sea

and its glyph-jogging blusters

rock the West Rocks Hotel.

(Eastbourne)

Pigeon love or pigeon hate?

I thought I could just wait and see

what happened next –

but they just flew off.

(Eastbourne)

She sells seashells

at the Sea Shell Hotel…

but they’re free at the beach,

as would-be-customers must know well.

(Eastbourne)

Working out her sponsors

is surely too complex

for any of them to get

decent value for money.

(Eastbourne)

You can’t tell seagulls

where to shit

and this shit-storm of a roof

looks like staying theirs.

(Hastings)

THREE PREMISES IN LEWES

I like a good specialism

but I could see no books on windows,

let alone

bow windows in particular.

It must be a Lewes thing

What else can explain

this window’s display

of blatantly un-ochre clothes?

It's enough to make me fear

that the rights of men

are also limited

round about here.

(Lewes)

One of the rather few

railway stations with a beach.

OK, only a shingle beach,

but then it is only a railway station.

(Lewes)

I refuse to be afraid

of ceramic dogs,

however long they’ve been chained up

in a dark and foodless cave.

(Lewes)

I understand

and yet suspect that –

even as a fly -

I’d struggle to acquire the taste.

(The taste being, incidentally, for location, not food. Golden dung flies (Scathophaga stercoraria) visit dung pats primarily to mate and lay eggs – they are carnivorous, it’s the larvae eat the dung.)

I’d sooner be veiled by violets

or drizzled with daisies

than gashed by gorse.

Yet I do want to feel…

Many bees

live largely underground.

We should not be surprised

to see a bumble burrow.

(70% of the world's 20,000 known bee species are ground-nesting, including many of the 250 species of bumblebee)

Are wallflowers entitled

to grow against hedges?

After all, there’s no hedge flower

to grow against walls.

You may seek the perfect

daisy constellation,

but in the absence of an established definition

how will you know if you find it?

Do trees engage

in unlucky numbers?

If they do, the downside here

looks like it was getting felled.

She looks like an optimist

but if this train isn’t coming

none of the rest of us

will be surprised…

(Petersfield Railway Station - in fact, the train was only 15 minutes late)

What sins

have these tulips committed

that the church has seen fit

to imprison them?

(St Peter's Church, Petersfield)

This is a neat solution

to a problem my cremation will avoid:

running out of space

to commemorate those below.

(St Peter’s Church, Petersfield)

I’m no croquet expert

but I have to say this set up looks

challenging at best,

possibly impossible.

(St Peter’s Church, Petersfield – evidently central, incidentally, to the history of the town that developed in the fields surrounding it)

When turning a kite

into a lamp.

take care not to turn

the lamp into a kite…

(Nurstead House, Petersfield)

They do things

economically here:

sooner contradiction

than repair.

(Madeleine's Kitchen, Petersfield)

I’d advise

leaving the customers a little more space

to feel their expectations

have been exceeded.

(Petersfield)

I can never remember

what they're called,

but they're out again -

which always surprises me…

(I'm teasing a little: that is, of course, as I did not forget, Myosotis sylvatica)

Do I want to learn

that much about flooring,

whether or not next door’s magic

seals it in my memory?

(Petersfield)

If you fall

down the steps

they’re unlikely

to help you up.

(Southampton)

It looks as if

this Revolution

didn't get much further

than the spelling.

(Southampton)

Not much of a bonus

in my opinion,

but perhaps they pay them

to their staff.

(Southampton)

How must it feel to be a female blackbird –

I dare not call them blackbirdettes –

knowing that your very name

assumes that you are male.

The war on these enemies

may never be won:

they will be back -

they are plucked, but not fucked.

Up against

the green and brown

a perfect clutch of primroses

pales into significance.

I know a trend

when I see one

though I am a tad more iffy

on the distinctions.

How about Sneaky Sneaks

or Snoopy Snoops

and, though I'm not sure what Snups are,

I'd bet on them being Snuppy.

(Aldgate, London)

My hot water bottle clock

is rarely wrong. Just now,

lukewarmth in darkness,

it says it’s roughly five.

Did I really have to come

all the way to Amsterdam, just to see a jackdaw?

Or do I mean: did this jackdaw really have to fly

all the way from England to get my attention?

(Rotterdam)

I don’t know what ‘sprinter’ means

in Dutch, but a sprinter proves

a slower train

than my failure to translate it had suggested.

(Oddly, I found, Google claims that the Dutch word ‘sprinter’ is equivalent to the British word ‘sprinter’. Perhaps the point is that sprinters are worn out very quickly and can’t be expected to compete over long distances. I should have caught a ‘middle distance runner’ between Rotterdam and Amsterdam.)

Only after the initial blow

did he spot

that the body in sexy question

was just a lighter case.

(Amsterdam)

Either Pisa

Has come to Amsterdam,

or I can’t hold my camera

very straight.

(Amsterdam)

What’s Leonardo

doing here?

Isn't Rembrandt

famous enough?

(Amsterdam)

How can you go wrong

with an inflatable woman?

If she loses her charm

you can let her down gently.

(Amsterdam shop window)

Aldgate was demolished in 1760

yet still boasts its own High Street and church,

two underground stops and a bus station.

That’s my kind of afterlife…

(Aldgate, London - that, though, is Fenchurch Street railway station, for some reason not called Aldgate station)

Is that equation still in place?

Money and power for youth and beauty?

I like to think not,

that she’s the one who has all four.

If Tom fails to sync

with the violet bushbaby,

let's hope the old girls

catch musical fire with Sophia.

(Bournemouth)

If I say stop

then stop.

If I say go,

fuck off!

(Cambridge Heath, London)

If only my tongue

and any tail I used to have

or might acquire

were or would be that well matched!

(Aldgate, London)

Here we are

putting the end in Southend

as approached from the south.

So… what does that forfend?

(Southend)

Before we get to the rights and wrongs....

Do they look miserable

because they're unwelcome, or are they unwelcome

because they're miserable?

(Southend)

We are the shingle-fish

breaching our surface:

not stranded

but at home.

(Deptford, London)

Which 25,000

would you prefer:

dogs in Slough

or lions in the world?

England has a dog for every five people. The population of Slough is some 125,000, so it likely has 25,00 dogs. There are estimated to be just 25,000 wild lions worldwide. The Chow Chow is the dog most often thought to look leonine.

It doesn't look fine

It doesn't look specialist.

It doesn't really look like art.

I guess those are the clouds…

(Chichester)

Of course this building

is alarmed:

every building ought to be,

given the trends in world events.

(Southwark, London)

Here's Brighton

with its glitter-glimpse of sea -

minus the glitter

in a photograph, sadly…

(Brighton)

I like a criss

I like a cross

I like a criss-cross

even more.

(Southwark, London)

You cannot drape

a painted word,

however large

you spell out the intention…

(Deptford, London)

Not so much the doughnuts

as the divisions –

and the curious warnings

about wet paint.

(London Bridge)

I suspect that this disposal

isn't down to brokenness, but simply to the sun emerging

how many umbrellas

has the former owner got at home?

(Bermondsey, London)

When a pigeon

is reduced

to eating its shadow

you know bird times are getting hard.

(Deptford, London)

Can you duck when you’re flying?

If you can,

the ducks are ducking

behind the tree.

(Deptford, London)

Such a beautiful chapel!

If only

I could hold my funeral

while I’m still alive…

(Brompton Cemetery, London)

Walker walks

no more upon this earth.

I stroll past

not quite regardless.

(Brompton Cemetery, London)

If a flower

can't lie at peace

in a cemetery,

where exactly can it?

(Brompton Cemetery, London)

That's a daft amount of daffs –

daffy with daffs,

daffinately over-daffed,

the very daffination of daff-daft…

(Hackney, London)

This is a sad sock

Even if it had a friend,

even if it had a foot

I can't see it being happy.

I was going to say

‘It’s bound to be wet

when water vans kiss’ -

except that it’s been raining every day.

This morning’s wind’s in just the right

furling and unfurling form –

even if I'm not too sure

we want the flag at all.

During 2025-6 prominent unofficial flying of the Union Jack or St George’s Cross became an indirect means of right wing parties signalling their racism.

It's something of a rule

that light escapes

Whoever thought that bars

would keep it in?

(Guildford Railway Station)

The intelligent magpie

is one of the few non-mammalian species

able to recognize itself in a mirror test –

and here’s the proof.

Quadruple feathers

are rather rare:

they ought to bring more luck

than even four-leaved clover.

This photo may be more than unspectacular

but it served a purpose:

only because I decided to take it

did I discover that I’d left my phone behind.

(Southampton: whether it was worth taking the photo after I’d retraced my steps to recover my phone is another matter…)

I don’t like the look

of being diverted:

it’s all too obvious

where it will end.

(Southampton)

I guess it lands

differently in Korea,

but I like the thought

that food should nourish more than the body.

(Clerkenwell, London)

How to commute

in two easy lessons

that probably didn't need

significant training.

(London-Weymouth train)

When every destination

is a blur

it makes sense

if the travellers join in....

(Southampton Central)

I’m calling this a ‘sun cloud’ -

solar-cumulus to be fancier -

with no meteorological basis,

just the weather in my eyes.

I may well be

more sous than chef

but Steph admits

I'm pretty good at stirring.

How much structure do I want?

Not so much

as that scarily regulated version of myself

against which I am pressed.

No hedge is natural

Yet when bad hedge

meets good hedge

I do sense a difference.

(Vauxhall Bridge, London)

Not only has spring

done it springy stuff

and sprung the daffy sprogs,

they're already somewhat down at heel.

No more than fifty billion light years

would bring us to the edge of the observable universe…

Only to realise, I dare say,

that what we’d seen was just the start.

(Hubble's photo, not mine! We are at the centre of the diameter of the sphere of the current 'observable universe', which is 93 billion light-years across. In miles, some 93 billion x 6 trillion…)

How come the doodle-grid

encompasses the world

at macro- and micro- scopic levels

and yet means nothing?

The focus on a single crocus

makes mythic sense,

Krókos being lovelorn when the flower was formed.

Yet you rarely see one exiled from the clump.

This is refreshing

At least once a year,

it seems,

the Tories are open to new ideas.

(Totton)

Looks like a fight

took place in our garden.

Looks like it might have been

leaves against feathers.

Not so much

shit creek without a pedal

pedal creek without a bike.

(Pimlico, London)

Golden rain

is rarer than gold

and gold is £4,000

per ounce.

(Mayfair, London)

I could shake a stick at this lot

if I had a stick.

Maybe that’s why

they’re not sticks, but umbrellas.

(St James’s, London)

She was looking out

from under a shadow,

wondering what that represented,

when I caught her looking away.

(Oxford Circus underground station)

This city gent

must be older than he looks.

Who wears a top hat

nowadays?

(Liverpool Street, London)

They look to be ready

for any number of fires,

here where there seems to be

nothing much to burn…

(Peckham, London)

I’ve heard that this shop

won’t be opening

ever again.

I wonder if it’s true?

(Hornsey, London)

It's good to be surprised

and I hadn't expected a low-fi version

of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

to pop up in Whitechapel.

(Whitechapel, London)

What is the best of all possible words?

‘Consummate’ might be a runner,

perfectly recalling that first time

we were moved to add a ‘d’.

All this streetlight

appears to illumine -

at least from this angle -

is that's there's a toilet to let.

(Bow, London)

I’ve seen umbrellas wounded -

a broken strut, a rip in the gut.

I’ve seen umbrellas dying.

But this one is definitely dead.

(Peckham, London)

Sorry about that

I didn't realize just how strong I am.

Did you want my wallet,

or was it just the phone?

(Ashurst Bridge)

The woodpeckers

seem to have fled their label,

though not before they’d pecked

not wood, but brick.

(Ashurst Bridge)

If I’m being photographed

photographing this,

what do the surveyors make

of a surveyor of surveyors?

(Ashurst Bridge)

I do admire how solidly

cattle stand around.

That may be why the game of cow skittles

has been rather slow to catch on.

‘Hiya Cynth, how’s it going?’

‘Good, thanks, Cynth! I had a great time

with Cynth and Cynth last night.

Though I'm still annoyed that all of us got the same name.’

It feels a bit soon

to be nostalgic about the EU,

even though I don't know anyone

who's glad that we're out.

(Brussels)

What is it about buildings

that makes them think

they can get away

without ever having a haircut?

(Brussels)

The Belgian pigeon

looks much the same as his British cousins.

What does he speak, though,

Flemish or French?

(Brussels)

Unless you count

a patch of sand as a destination,

this is a path to nowhere –

but it does look fast.

(Brussels)

I don't know what the Belgians

have against leaves -

or, come to that, against branches -

but the nature of the objection is clear.

(Brussels)

In the Euro-wait...

‘You know how you have to speak French

or else they get angry with you?’

Glad I'm going to Brussels, not Paris.

(St Pancras, London)

That must be twice

they refused to let someone win

wasn't the first smash

warning enough?

(Ladbrokes, Kings Cross, London)

How many forks

is a broken fork,

the halves of which

fork?

Long legs?

I suppose so,

up to a point -

but woefully short of the columns.

Night is when

you want a mattress,

but maybe this is not

the one you want.

(Clerkenwell, London)

Ross Smith, Josh Rock, Rob Cross…

What's with all the pretentious darts names?

Is it any wonder

that Jermaine Wattimena is Dutch?

(Those listed - and picture in order - are among the world's top-ranked 24 players at the time of the Winmau World Masters in Milton Keynes, ensuring them automatic entry. I’m sorry to see that Chuck Bull has slipped so far down the rankings that I couldn't find him. Luke Littler beat Luke Humphries in the final on 1 Feb 2026)

Clap for the pigeons!

Or stamp your feet.

More fun, perhaps, to try to kick them,

safely aware that you can’t.

(Southampton)

To peel

or not to peel

might seem an innocuous question,

but I wouldn't like to be flayed.

Who knows which colour

is the boss

in the world

of two-tone moss?

You’re wrong about that!

It would be worse

if the tin were empty,

indicating that I’d eaten them all.

Can I be a pedant

and point out that there are twelve corners

in three squares,

even if you insist on avoiding triangles?

(Three Corners Adventure Playground, Clerkenwell, London)

It feels polite

to blur this man

and his raggedy blanket

into a miasma of anonymity.

(Old Street underground station, London)

I suspect it’s the trainees

who get to design

the cardboard box building

that advertises the firm from outside.

(Wilkinson Eyre architects, Shoreditch, London)

I suppose you want

your ball back?

But we play hard ball round here,

so hard luck.

(Clerkenwell, London)

You wish it could be Christmas everyday?

If you do,

this house agrees:

it’s January 24^th.

(Clerkenwell, London)

When the light falls

on what is not a veil,

you may find yourself veiled

nonetheless.

(I got a bit of cellophane trapped in the TLS: that's 'Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat' by Elisabeth Louise Viglée Le Brun, 1782)

Who is

this near-imposter?

And why are they

not stocking him?

(HMV, Southampton: Corey Kent – he needs to work on the hyphen – is a country singer born in Oklahoma, 1994)

Could you have found

a more appropriate backdrop

for such an impoverished

urban tree?

These circumstances

have remained unforeseen since 2017,

posing the question:

how hard can it be to foresee the past?

(the original closure was put down to a building problem, but as Nat West reduced their branches from 1,550 at the start of 2017 to 450 at the end of 2025, I don’t suppose much effort was put into solving the issue)

I've never been in there

Some online reviews

claim it’s misnamed,

others say it isn’t.

(Trip Adviser ranks it 19^th of 25 restaurants in Totton, not an overwhelming endorsement, but based on very little data)

When did ‘mate’

start to mean

someone with whom

you do not mate?

(Internet image illustrating platonic friendship)

You wait months

to find someone thoroughly orange

then spot four of them

coordinating orange acts to boot.

(Mayfair, London, January 2026: After taking the photograph for ‘Orange Revolution’, November 20205, I resolved to take a picture every time I saw a fully orange person)

It’s lucky the car park isn’t very full

given that I’m taking up two spaces

with my otherwise-modest Toyota

and its greedy reflection…

(Southampton)

Tiles can be beautiful

but how often do we hear that

said of the grout

that we expect to hide beneath?

(Chancery Lane underground station. London)

If you happen to have

unmatched feet,

here’s your chance to match them for nothing

with unmatched footwear.

(Southampton)

I’m not convinced the complex scaffolding prize

is really worth winning:

they build it up, of course they do,

but fall down on the cash.

(Soho, London)

No wonder the police

are slow to respond:

they're all tied up

collecting malparked bikes.

(This implausible claim is made in South Kensington)

We’re forty miles from Surrey

Close compared with Yorkshire, Sydney,

Mars or the nearest nebula,

but a pretty long walk from here.

(Ashurst... Glasgow is 365 miles from Ashurst, Sydney is 10,700 miles, Mars is 140 million miles on average. The closest nebula to Earth is the Helix Nebula, 650-700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. One light year is 5,878,625,370,000 miles - call it six trillion - so we’re talking a decent schlepp there.)

I wonder how close

they think I think Mars is now?

And how much closer

they’ve persuaded it to come?

(South Kensington Underground Station. In case it helps the Science Museum, I believe the answer varies considerably. The closest Mars has ever been to Earth in recorded history was in August 2003, when the planets were approximately 35 million miles apart. This close approach occurs when Earth passes between the Sun and Mars, aligning the three celestial bodies. When I saw this poster in January 2026, Mars was 235m miles from earth, closer to the solar conjunction when it is opposite the Sun from Earth – near to the maximum distance 250m miles. So the museum’s timing is open to question: right now, I’d guess that most people seeing the poster do believe that Mars is closer than it is. To be fair, they might mean Luke Jerram’s touring artwork model of Mars, which you might have guessed was on view somewhere in Britain, though even that is currently accessible only in Massachusetts.)

The dead on the living

seems the wrong way round.

Shouldn't the efforts of the living

be built on the achievements of the dead?

(Southampton)

This is the cleverest pheasant I know

Aware that I take photographs,

he always strikes the identical pose

when I drive past, keen to be seen at his best.

(Minstead)

This type of Gellyfish

has no sting.

I doubt if they can guard themselves,

let alone the contents of the flat.

(Fordingbridge: my sister-in-law, Geraldine ‘Gelly’ Kent, is a keen aquarist)

Why didn’t we think

of that?

An external curtain

to intercept the drafts at source!

(Fordingbridge)

This is a dog-friendly pub

Yet should the pooches

really be

let loose on the cappuccinos?

(The Three Lions, Fordingbridge)

The pen is

mightier than

the penis

even though it has the same letters.

(Internet image)

I suspect this post

of taking the double piss

by parking on the red lines,

then showing them up as insubstantial...

(Southampton)

No-one likes parking cones

But does that justify

treating one with this much

cone-tempt?

(Southampton)

Judging by the guide

to its wildlife in winter

even the hardiest of the park’s inhabitants

will start to feel the cold.

The Big Van has gone

I don’t remember it having a tail,

but it seems to have wagged it

on the way out.

File under

‘I can't believe

they're not leaves’

while knowing you can believe it easily enough.

(Kensington, London)

Do they sell buzzes and bangs

or is the shop called Onamatopia

because that was the least

onomatopoeic word they could conjure?

(Lyndhurst)

There's the whistle!

Have they just begun

or was that the sale’s

concluding Phweeeeep!!! ?

(Marylebone, London)

I know I’m not much

of a completer-finisher

but I do OK

when it comes to books and sex and Twix.

The moss caterpillar

is crossing the woodland floor.

Its butterflies are rather rare,

I wonder what we're in for?

From where

would you like

your bricks knocked out?

This wall seems to know.

(Totton)

Brett the window cleaner is a helpful chap

but he’s left our hosepipe out on the lawn.

Does he not realise that, under Stephian law,

that’s very close to a capital offence?

Here's a house

that failed the test

of reading the seasonally altered

waste collection schedule.

Having spent a summer

without occlusion

I’m happy enough to see, if imprecisely,

matters getting vague.

That's what I call

a thorough felling:

I'll found a tree religion

if it rises from that!

Supposing the shadow

of wood on wood

were an illusion,

where would we be?

Time again to monitor

how the paint is chipping

in the pedestrian underpass

that runs beneath the A 326.

The sun is winning

the tunnel’s light contest

despite the handicap

of 93 million miles.

Here may be where not to live

Right up against the railway line

at just the point where trains must hoot

to warn any pedestrians on the upcoming crossing.

(3 Foxhill Close, Ashurst)

A fridge

in the forest?

That

is not cool.

If I had a parking spot

as convenient as this

I, too, might be

exceptionally reluctant to leave it.

(Southampton)

These chafer grubs

appearing to grin at each other,

might both be looking to say:

‘It’s no good grinning when you’re dead’.

Has anybody seen a dog

without a blue lead?

It was being taken for a walk

by a woman with a matching lack.

The Forest Edge retirement flats

are three miles from any plausible forest,

leading me to wonder

just how big an edge can be…

(Totton)

OPPONENT OF GROWTH

2026-10-07T03:50:57.855-07:00

The Death Suite 8: Opponent of Growth

From September 2024 onwards I had regular scans to check on the progress of my tumour in the mesentery, and the development and subsequent progress of any other tumours. I was feeling generally good until the summer, when symptoms started to appear. A scan then showed that I did have small but fast-growing tumours in my mesentery, abdominal wall, bowel, and lungs. That fed into the decision – which concludes this section - to have palliative chemotherapy from October 2025. That aims to shrink the tumours or, at least, slow their growth, but cannot eliminate them entirely.

Numbered for reference when seeking images - poems reserved are indicated through rolling update - for an image by 1 October, with note on the work as desired (* indicates images with note at the end)

1 Alexander James Hamilton

Set aside the economy

my savings and relationships and knowledge and mind –

in the new language of growth,

I’m against it!

Alexander James Hamilton: Archytas, 2014 - photography, unique work, 120 x 90 cms *

When someone I don’t know

asks how I am,

I’m not sure whether to treat that as vatic

or land them with cancer straight off.

3 Jenny Brosinski

It’s easy for me

to tell Steph not to worry:

I won’t be around

to deal with what comes after.

Jenny Brosinski: Scratch me if you can, 2019 - oil, charcoal and oilpencil on canvas, 215 x 125 cm

4 Sarah Pettitt

It's one thing to listen to time

another to know how best to respond

when you hear how loudly

it's ticking.

Sarah Pettitt: Time, 2026 - Graphite on paper, 15 x 21cm

What’s the point of learning things

if you’ll soon be gone?

It’s better than staying ignorant,

only to hang on.

Is it time to stop saving

for an old age I’m not going to get?

Or should I resist significant spend

on what is likely to prove short term?

7 Giulia Ricci

I think I’ve had it

with ‘dying of cancer’:

time to move on

to the ‘living with’ phase.

Giulia Ricci: Untitled #6 (Everything Flows), 2026 - Ivory black gouache and rich gold bronze pigment mixed in rain water (rain water collected in Boncellino, Italy, on December 24th-25th, which caused the river level to rise to red alert), on Saunders Waterford 356gsm paper, 21 x 29.5 cm *

I may be twelve years younger than Trump

but I must be too old already

if the world is making the identical error

for a second time.

9 Fiona G Roberts

As we’re all doomed

setting aside any afterlives of quibble,

it doesn’t much matter

how the rest of this thought runs.

Fiona G Roberts: Untitled 80, 2023 - Ink on paper, 35cm x 25cm

10 Julie Verhoeven

I’ve put on a few pounds

but it’s hard to take dieting

all that seriously,

just to look better in the coffin.

Julie Verhoeven:

11 Sarah Jane Moon

What I resist

is trying so hard

not to be dead

that I leave no room for being alive.

Sara Jane Moon: Midnight Kingfisher, 2025 -

12 Hannah Maybank

According to the surgeon

I am ‘several standard deviations from the norm’.

I have to remind Steph

that he’s talking about my health.

Hannah Maybank: No 12, September - October 2026 - Pencil on paper, 51 x 33cm

13 Michael Stubbs

It seems I’ve survived

the first three spins.

Would I be good

at Russian Roulette?

Michael Stubbs: Better Future, 2022 - household paint, tinted floor varnish, digital poster on MDF, 122 x 122 cm

14 Colin Crumplin

I do not suffer from ‘scanxiety’

as our doctors terms the effect

on a life that hangs on images.

But that could be a pretence.

Colin Crumplin: Lungs I, 2016 - Acrylic and oil paint on paper, image 34 cms high

15 Juliette Losq

When the time comes

to fuck the future and live in the past

I will say nothing –

so that cannot be yet.

Juliette Losq: Rocaille Ensauvagée, 2016 - Ink, acrylic and watercolour on paper, 127cm x 91cm *

I might be tempted to hit it

with money, but cancer –

to, I suppose, its credit -

isn’t so easy to bribe.

17 Catriona Robertson

'Exist or otherwise'

may be the ultimate boiling down

of what we're here for -

if there is a what.

18 Alan Rankle

Is it easier to leave

than to be left behind?

So far as I know

neither require any effort.

Alan Rankle: Untitled Painting, 2009 - Oil on canvas, 150x120cm

19 Susan Collis

Will he or won’t he?

Spoiler alert: he will.

I’m getting fed up

with wondering when.

20 Quilla Constance

I'm becoming ambitious

Two years back I'd have taken 68,

now I'm starting to wonder about 70.

Where will it end?

Quilla Constance: QC in the studio with Akee’s Majestic Smile, 2026

21 Cecelia Bonilla

Do I want to know

what only the dead can?

That would be of interest,

but I think it can wait.

22 Eric Butcher

Could I get fed up

with having to tell people every three months

that the scans show no change?

Perhaps, but not yet…

Eric Butcher: T/R. 1018, 2022 - Recycled Paint Fragments: Acrylic, Graphite + Acrylic Gel on Glass, 55 x 44 cm

I almost feel guilty

I keep meeting people

who suffer from cancer,

while I’m feeling good.

24 Cathy Lomax

I was driving a car

but I couldn’t see anything

out of the windscreen.

That dream felt about right.

Cathy Lomax: Phoenix to Fairdale, 2013, oil on paper, 25.5 x 32 cm

You only live once…

Twice if you count the period

after you’ve been diagnosed

with terminal cancer.

26 Geraldine Swayne

I never thought I'd live to see

a second term of President Trump.

There's part of me

that wishes I had not.

Geraldine Swayne: Mr Trump 2020 - Pencil on paper, LP record cover.

27 Hannah Hughes

I’m feeling normal

which doesn’t feel normal in my condition,

but I like how I’m feeling

and how the paradox sounds.

28 John Walter

Perhaps I will have time enough at last

right now, though,

I seem to be making

a rather-too-frenetic job of dying.

John Walter: Möbius Heights, 2025 - acrylic ink on watercolour paper, 38 x 56cm *

Having survived

four episodes of scanxiety,

is it time to hope

I might die ‘with’, instead of ‘of’?

30 Rosie Gibbens

Unless you count this

I haven’t thought about death

for several days.

Does that mean I won’t die?

31 Susan Stockwell

Woody Allen

is famously against death.

I'm in favour,

but not until, say, 2058.

Susan Stockwell: Salvation, 2024 - Intaglio print, ink on Somerset satin paper, 34 x 47cm

32 Oona Grimes

Now I have stomach ache

and a new form of hypochondria:

connecting every little thing

to cancer.

Oona Grimes: Etruscan ghost : Medea Syndrome #119, 2025 -

33 Anna Sebastian

This is a dead letter day

Being the first on which

a medical communication

uses the term ‘palliative’.

Anna Sebastian: Torso, 2010 - Etching, 50 x 40 cm *

When the Big C

meets that foreboding P

it doesn’t sound as good as, oddly enough,

I continue to feel.

35 Uli Ap

I plan to defy

the medical terminal-ology

that would have me doomed.

I just need to work out how…

36 Virginia Verran

A world of pain

and hunger pangs and sleeplessness

tells you what a good world is:

full of ease and rest.

Virginia Verran: Orange/Pink (fallen), 2026 - Oil and pencil on canvas, 30 x 30 cms

If one in two gets cancer

that sounds like a lot,

but one in one get death:

maybe that’s the way to go.

38 Maria Lalic

If there’s a moment and location

to suit all events,

how do I calculate

the best time and place for death?

Maria Lalic: Pozzuoli Red Landscape Painting, 2025

(The Grotto Pozzuoli, with Virgil’s Tomb. van Wittel. 1702)

oil paint, Pozzuoli earth on canvas, 49 x 64 cm

39 Adam Dix

Ahead of the scan result meeting

I imagine the death sentence:

‘I’m sorry to tell you

that there has been considerable growth.’

Adam Dix: Disbelief, 2025 - Oil glazes on paper, 74 x 56 cm *

40 Stefana McClure

If I’ll soon be ‘quite dead at last’

as Beckett had it,

doesn’t that mean that I’m quite dead already,

it being no more than a matter of completing the process?

Stefana McClure: Malone Meurt: a novel by Samuel Beckett, 2026, cut paper, 29 cm circumference *

Is it time to start behaving worse

so Steph doesn’t miss me?

Or would that just

contaminate her memories?

42 Elizabeth Magill

I do accept

that it’s simpler for me:

I won’t have to deal

with my absence.

Elizabeth Magill: Poem 42, 2026 - Oil on paper, 25.5 x 18cm

43 Bella Easton

‘Stuck in the middle with you’

comes to mind

when the scan results indicate

how many tumours are stuck in the middle of me.

Bella Easton: Echo Chamber and the seeds of The Narcissi series I,II,III,IV, 2026 - 80 hand-coloured intercut woodcut prints, 4 x120 x 100 cm *

44 Poppy Whatmore

Tumours to the right of me

tumours to the left of me…

To where

were the six hundred headed?

Poppy Whatmore: Don’t Kick Me Under The Table, 2022 - Gloss paint, acrylic on paper, 59 x 74cm

Steph doesn’t want me to die

Whereas I want to live -

which isn’t quite as similar

as it sounds.

Is it true that if you have one cancer

you can't get another?

I'm keen on advantages

but no, that isn't one.

47 Claire Morgan

Do you want to know full details

of my bowel movements?

What am I talking about?

I don’t want to know full details of my bowel movements.

Claire Morgan: I only dared to touch you once I knew that you were dead (shit), 2026 - photo John McKenzie

‘May the illness’

I am wished, ‘pass soon’.

But the only way that’s going to happen

is by passing soon myself.

49 Sarah Woodfine

I won’t get down before I die

apart from getting these thoughts down -

on the grounds that, post-demise,

they won’t be very easy to record.

50 Pascal Rousson

If you’re going to die -

and I’ve heard the stats

are overwhelming -

you might as well make the most of it.

51 Adeline de Monseignat

Never mind my last words

I can predict those,

even if I’m wrong.

What will be the first words I can’t hear?

Adeline de Monseignat: Leaf I, 2025 - Watercolour on paper, 30.5 x 23cm

52 Bettina Von Zwehl

Perhaps

too weak to tell them they are wrong

I’ll even hear the question

‘has he gone?’

Bettina von Zwehl: Day 339, 2026 - Photograph on rice paper

53 Christina Niederberger

Does an afterlife make any sense?

If not, I'll have none of it:

I wouldn’t be seen dead

existing outside logic.

Christina Niederberger: Parallel World, 2022 - Oil and acrylic on canvas, 150 x 170cm *

53a Marguerite Horner

Not only is Marguerite praying for me

she’s asking others to do the same.

My version of Pascal’s wager

is to be pleased, just in case.

Marguerite Horner: Ecstacy Comes, 2025 - watercolour on paper, 20 x 20 cm *

It seems this chemo

isn't a matter of life and death,

only of its timing –

although, I suppose, that is the matter.

55 Roland Hicks

Madame de Defland was so scared of death

she wished that she’d never been born.

But isn’t post mortem

the exact same state?

Roland Hicks: Drip, drip, 2016 - Gouache and coloured pencil on cut-out paper collage on OSB, 40x50cm

56 Sam Hodge

I’m not petrified of death

but, I suppose,

am happy to be petrified afterwards

if I haven’t already been burned.

Sam Hodge: Out of the Cliff, 2024 - Ink made with peat from Hunstanton beach with collage of dark brown earth from West Runton beach sprinkled onto acrylic medium monotype on Abaca tissue, 33 x 26 cm

57 Jason Oddy

Do you want proof

that our natural state

is not immortal?

Dying is a skill that needs no practice.

Jason Oddy: Magnolia Prophylactorium, Odesa, Ukraine, 1999 - photograph *

It must be time

for a corny cancer love poem:

my wife has a PICC line

to my heart.

Notes:

‘It’s easy for me’ – Steph is my wonderfully supportive wife.

‘It's one thing to listen to time’ - written just prior to hearing the results from my scan on 11 Sept 2024 – this and the following two quatrains are probably down to ‘scanxiety’

‘I think I’ve had it’ – in fact, no further growth was revealed.

‘I may be twelve years younger than Trump’ - Donald Trump was re-elected US President on 5 November 2024

‘According to the surgeon’ - I had a follow-up appointment with Mr West on 10 December, and he was very positive about how my health was going)

‘It seems I’ve survived’ – those three spins being sepsis and my two operations

‘I never thought I'd live to see’ - Donald Trump was inaugurated as President on 20 Jan 2025

‘I’m feeling normal’ – as of 27 February 2025, a feeling that lasted a few months.

‘This is a dead letter day’ - as in a letter from Dr Rees to my GP, but copied to me on 10 June 2025)

‘Steph doesn’t want me to die’ - Those different emphases fed into our joint decision-making for when to start chemo to slow things down. Start too early, and you may miss out on a period when you could have been living well; start too late, and you might be too weak to tolerate the chemo that would have extended your life. It’s a tricky call.

This and the following poems stem from my diagnosis update in July 2025: four areas of tumour big enough to show up on the scan, three of them new, but increasing slowly. I have been having some symptoms – extra tiredness, stomach aches, back ache, bowel irregularities – but not yet bad enough to require palliative chemotherapy. Consequently, the decision to strat chemo followed on from the next scan, six weeks later.

‘It seems this chemo’ / ‘It must be time’ – My palliative chemo started in October 2025, for which I was fitted with a PICC line – a Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter is a long, thin, flexible tube inserted into a vein in the upper arm and advanced until its tip rests in a large vein just above the heart. It is used to deliver the drugs for long-term intravenous treatments.

Images

As chosen or made by favourite artists in response to the poem they selected - an idea proposed by Emma Cousin.

Notes from artists on their images:

Adam Dix: 'Disbelief' was a reaction to the tsunami of disturbing global politics, whose shadow hangs over us.

Bella Easton: 'Echo Chamber & the Seeds of the Narcissi' comprises four interconnected works generated from the same hand-cut woodblocks. Through repeated layering and changing colour relationships, each work becomes a variation on the last, creating a visual echo across the series. Central to the work is the opening as a place of passage rather than absence. Rather than marking a void, these portal-like forms invite the viewer to look through as well as at the image, creating thresholds between interior and exterior worlds where perception, memory and uncertainty remain in continual dialogue.

I’ve chosen poem 43 because I was drawn to its idea of “the middle” as a psychological rather than simply physical space. That notion seemed to resonate with my ongoing exploration of openings and portals as places of passage and transition, rather than absence.

Alexander James Hamilton: 'Archytas' is from the ´Oil + Water´ series (2014 - 2016). A large ossuary of crude oil & river water taken directly from below the thick ice of the Yenesei river are frozen together in temperatures below minus 50 degrees. This is done in a field studio deep in the forests of Siberia specifically to enable a thermo dynamic process ´enthalpy of fusion´. Vast pressures are created inside the sculpture, resulting in unrepeatable gas formations, fissures & wax secretions. Ths we have a sphere of crude oil set inside a block of frozen river water, photographed as it releases itself under its own conditions rather than being composed or drawn.

Marguerite Horner is an actively Christian artist friend. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) argued in the posthumously published ‘Pensées’ (1670) that any rational person should believe in God, as the potential rewards of believing correctly are infinitely positive, while the downsides of believing wrongly are minor; whereas the potential rewards of disbelieving correctly are minor, while the downsides of being wrong against God are catastrophic. Whether that’s sufficient to make yourself genuinely believe is another matter.

Juliette Losq: Rocaille is an 18th-century French style of ornamentation inspired by the forms of rocks and shells. Here its artifice becomes wild again - the natural forms that the rococo stylised are being reclaimed by nature.

Stefana McClure: Malone Meurt: a novel by Samuel Beckett is from an ongoing series of sculptural drawings that deconstruct books, often lengthy ones such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick or the Rand McNally Reader’s Digest Atlas of the World, reconfiguring them as continuous balls of string. For this body of work, I have always been drawn to material so compelling that it constitutes a complete world unto itself. Recent reconstructions have focused on circadian novels: Ulysses (a single day, June 16th , 1904), Mrs. Dalloway (a Wednesday in the middle of June, 1923), Between the Acts (another June day, this time in 1939), After Dark by Haruki Murakami (a winter night in Tokyo from 11 pm to 6:45 am). I have also been reconfiguring ‘text cities’: modernist city novels through which the reader, flaneur or flaneuse, can wander and get lost. Ulysses again (I love that Joyce said that if the city one day suddenly disappeared it could be reconstructed from his book), Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul.

Christina Niederberger: Surely, an afterlife would have to inhabit a parallel world which defies all logic known to us in our lifetime.

Jason Oddy: From the series I did on ex-Soviet sanatoria along Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, mixing themes of wellness and eternity

Giulia Ricci: I have been making work over the past few years dealing with the grief caused by various destructive floods that hit my native village (Boncellino, in Emilia-Romagna, Italy) - floods which are climate-change related. The image is taken from a photo of cracked mud on the river bank as it was drying after one of the floods. I traced the cracks and painted them with a nod to the repairing technique of kintsugi.

Anna Sebastian: Torso is from a series of etchings which aim to place an audience into a state where they become aware of their own mortality. These etchings are part of an exhibition and collaborative project called 'Heterotopia Provocation'. Originally shown as a group to produce an entire body, the images were complemented, and indeed exaggerated by the use of a high pitched sound, creating an immersive, if distinctly uncomfortable arena.

John Walter: Möbius Heights is a proposal for a hospice.

References:

‘Madame de Defland was so scared of death’ - Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand (1696 -1780) was a French hostess and patron of the arts, famous for the literary quality of her letters, and her close friendships with such as Voltaire and Walpole.

‘Tumours to the right of me’ - ‘Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred’ according to Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, 1854

‘If I’ll soon be ‘quite dead at last’’ quotes the first line in Samuel Beckett's novel Malone Dies, 1951: ‘I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all’

‘You only live once’ - Ian Fleming: ‘You Only Live Twice’, 1964

A world of pain: effectively references Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, 1943. Hunger pangs even when I’d just eaten were a curious symptom at this stage.

‘Stuck in the middle with you’ is the title of a song by Stealers Wheel, 1973

‘What I resist’ may be an echo of ‘I was trying so hard to be myself I was turning into somebody else’ from ‘Out of the Blue (Into the Fire)’ by The The, 1986

‘Perhaps I will have time enough at last’ - The Fall: ‘Time Enough at Last’ 2003

‘Is it easier to leave’ - this popular sentiment is, for example, a line in REM’s song ‘Leaving New York’, 2004

'Woody Allen' - his summary in 2010 of decades of deadpan negative views was: 'My relationship with death remains the same: I'm strongly against it.'

EARS FOR THE EYES

2026-10-05T09:03:07.335-07:00

CONTINUOUS UPDATE OF MATERIAL based on the show at Transition Gallery, Unit 25a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, London E8 4QN 10 Feb - 4 March 2017

ARTY magazine launch and evening viewing was Feb 2017

Art from Alli Sharma, Clare Price, Jonny Briggs, EJ Major, Kate Lyddon, Cathy Lomax, Adam Dix, Emma Cousin, John Banting and Kelvin Okafor

Writing by Matthew Francis, Joan McGavin, Stephanie Carey-Kent, Claire Crowther, Tamar Yoseloff, Julian Stannard, Saradha Soobrayen, Paul Carey-Kent, Emma Cousin, Cathy Lomax, Alli Sharma and EJ Major.

Curated / edited by Paul Carey-Kent

I am expanding my list of ear-related artworks below as and when I make new discoveries.

As of April 2026, the dozen works in the show are supplemented by 107 additional examples.

Installation images

We think naturally of sound when considering the ear, so there's a certain wilful perversity in making it the subject of a show of paintings, drawings and photographs with no sound directly featured. It does mean, though, that the walls have ears. And that provides an opportunity for different perspectives, looking at the ear as a design, signifier, analogy, symbol etc, and always with the sense that there is something beyond what we see...

The show is accompanied by poets' and artists' writings in a special edition of ARTY magazine, which also includes a suitably quirky roll-call of the ear's appearances in art.

WORKS IN THE SHOW

Cathy Lomax: Audrey's Ear, 2017

Oil on linen, 40 x 40 cm

Cathy Lomax is fascinated by the romance of cinema, and her paintings – which she often shows in groups - link iconic scenes to form visual narratives in which we suspect she’d like to take part. Here Audrey Hepburn’s gamine beauty updates Vermeer’s pearl earring, while taking us back to a time of glamour in which the excesses of celebrity culture seem no more than incipient. Is there a snake in the idyllic grass, though – or, rather, smuggled into her famous hair?

____________________

Clare Price: t.h.10, 2016

oil and acrylic on canvas, 31x36cm

If pareidolia most often stands for our tendency to see faces in the natural world, perhaps it’s aureidolia which leads me to see ear shapes in Clare Price’s abstractions, titled by a personal code and evoked a certain hesitant vulnerability. Or are those sound waves? Or are we inside the ear? Poised lyrically between trembling borders and invasive mist, they both seem to be listening to the other’s muted echo of geometric abstraction, so posing the question: what made the original sound?

____________________

EJ Major: Matiére Signalétique, 2017

Selected film stills

E.J. Major’s selected film stills set up visual parallels between Haneke’s La Pianiste and two other films, analysing the scene, as Deleuze proposes, not by traditional genres, but by what is intrinsic to the images themselves (their material as signals). A long take of Erika, the film’s central protagonist (a woman whose contrasting worlds are classical music and voyeuristic sex) recalls a moment of contemplation in Ozu’s Late Spring. Like the music interrupted in Haneke’s scene, says Major 'the suggestive function of the association is open'. Similarly as Erika enters a lift with her mother and bars access to a young man who has entered the apartment block behind them, is there something in the scene that we are not seeing? There's a visual echo of Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, but, says Major 'as one sheet of past is recognized, another, the sound, underwhelms the connection'. If in our mind’s ear we can hear the desperation in Schneider‘s voice as Brando chases up the stairs after her in the scene before the film’s tragic denouement, that suggests a darker side to Haneke’s filmic pun. Can we, Major asks, ‘see’ that? In looking, what do we hear?

____________________

John Banting: Dead Gossip, 1931

Gouache on card - 48 x 63.5 cm (courtesy Austin Desmond Fine Art)

It’s no surprise, seeing this alluringly creepy painting, to learn that John Banting (1902-72) was associated with the British surrealist movement in the 1930’s. An animal’s skull seems to have retained not just some well-formed teeth, but a reptilian eye, the sensing tip of a porcine nose, a fleshy and implausibly human ear, and some vestigial system of circulation. Is that all that’s needed to talk ill of the dead from their own perspective?

____________________

Alli Sharma: from the Bats series, 2017,

each oil on board, 20 x 15 cm

Alli Sharma makes lush and openly sentimental paintings of objects or animals to which we might imagine ourselves relating: keepsakes and jewellery, for example, or cats and birds. Her series of bats tweak that somewhat, as few people see them in the same sweet light. Nor, I suspect, do they differentiate one bat from another too much, but what comes across in Sharma’s set is the attractive personality of different animals.

____________________

Adam Dix: The Collectors. 2013.

Ink and oil on paper - 72 x 52 cm

Adam Dix generates a haunting atmosphere with his 'oil as if it were watercolour' technique by presenting figures redolent of the past in would-be sci-fi landscapes. Here the peculiar ritualistic uniforms – was this Laura Ashley’s design for the Ku Klux Klan? – reveal no ears. Perhaps hearing has been outsourced in this ambiguous timescape, hence the prominence of a communications tower to which obeisance must, it would seem, be paid. The mystery is increased by the obvious question: what are they collecting?

____________________

Kelvin Okafor: Katherine's Interlude, 2016

Graphite, charcoal & black coloured pencil on archival paper 79 x 67 cm

It makes sense to hear, given the technical assurance of his graphite and charcoal portraits, that 30 year old Londoner Kelvin Okafor has been drawing people obsessively since he was eight. His ‘Interlude’ series captures fourteen of his rather good-looking friends - but departs from the usual convention of engaging through the eyes as portals to the soul. Instead, we are led to wonder what Katherine might be thinking – or hearing.

____________________

Kate Lyddon: The Shell-Like Loop, 2017

Oil on canvas - 30x40cm

A central orifice acts as mouth to a red head, ear to a blue head, and general entry and exit point for what Kate Lyddon calls 'a medley of fleshy dripping drinking body parts'. It's tasty enough to eat, judged by the knife and fork wielded as he tries to eat her while she drinks him in a disturbing interaction of fluids. If that feels like a collage of myth, medievalism and body trauma to arrive at an alluring grotesquerie, then it's typical of her work.

____________________

Jonny Briggs: Forward Slashes Series # 1, 2013

Altered family photograph, 15 x 18cm

Much of Jonny Briggs’ practice creates new versions of his lost childhood through re-enactments involving his parents. The results are typically both more real than expected (as they look Photoshopped but are not) and psychologically charged. Here an old photo of the family pet is subject to an edit which proposes a disjuncture of the senses. The eyes now rhyme with the long ears as if the dog were seeing through them in the absence of eyes from their usual place.

____________________

Emma Cousin: Falling on Deaf Ears, 2017

Oil on canvas, 70 x 50cm

Emma Cousin’s paintings have an engagingly up front personality, bordering on the comic but balanced by a good deal of painterly acumen. The colloquial and the art-historical play off each other here, as an absurdly literal interpretation of an everyday phrase is delivered with a hint of Tiepolo. How fool is Cousin being, though? There may be a barb in the title, should anyone be visually tin-eared enough not to appreciate what she’s doing.

____________________

Clare Price: t.h.9, 2016

acrylic on canvas, 31x36cm

POEMS

Earring

I love the time of dangle-down -

my flesh in her flesh, my movements

her movements, my panorama hers -

the days when his whispers are mine.

I hate the time of jumbled up.

Unjewelled by the dark, I sweat:

why should she take me off by night?

What rumours are these about studs?

Paul Carey-Kent

____________________

Her Peculiar Oblations

sorted it weeks ago
so I don't have to pour oil
down my ears. I do anyway.

'Twice a day, twenty minutes'
said Nurse Florid in April
and then quite dreamily

as if considering the eye of the needle
'April is the cruellest month.'
Then she heaved herself

around the Treatment Room
in a miasma of giggles
'Oh, I do love ears!'

shooting her syringe
towards the ceiling
like the cowgirl in a B-movie

who gives it hard
and takes it hard
and who, by the end, is just one of the boys.

When I walked out
of Nurse Florid's Treatment Room
in dazzling April

my ears were so clean
I thought of banging out
an Alleluia with the Baptists.

I miss Nurse Florid
and her peculiar oblations.
I do it for her mostly.

Julian Stannard

____________________

A Charm for Earwigs

Witchy-beetle, forkin-robin,
no one heard you as you clambered
up the nursery slopes of pillow,

felt your way in heaving darkness
where a dreamer breathed siroccos,
scaled the north face of an earlobe,

stumbled on the antihelix
where the cartilage was ruckled
into an upended mizmaze,

teetered round its corrugations,
to the vortex where the tragus
overhung a bloodwarm grotto.

There was curl-room in the concha
but the scent of earwax drew you
through a straight and oozy burrow,

thrumming with a distant heartbeat.
First the walls were soft, then bony,
then antennae scratched a membrane.

Arrywiggle, horny-gollach,
you awoke me from my stupor,
rasping with a chitin stylus

on my mind’s long-playing vinyl,
ratcheting my taut tympanum
with your cacophonic tarsi,

set my ossicles percussing
with the clangour of rough music,
dustbins, copper saucepans, kettles.

Now I smear a linen poultice
with the pulp of roasted apple,
press it, wincing, on my pinna.

Malic steam pervades my chambers
to entice you with a perfume
sweeter than November compost.

Clipshears, codgybell, twitch-ballock,
lift your bristles from my eardrum,
let the sea of cochlea settle,

turn back from the labyrinth.

Matthew Francis

witchy-beetle, forkin-robin, arrywiggle,

horny-gollach, clipshears, codgybell,

twitch-ballock = dialect words for earwig - MF

____________________

and speaking of Van Gogh’s ear…

Most of the ear, or the lobe alone?
The latest thought is that most of the ear
was cut off by Van Gogh just before Christmas.

Cut by himself or by Gauguin’s sword?
The consensus seems that he did it himself
at the Yellow House, having threatened the friend
who was threatening to leave, whom he saw
as a traitor, a kind of a murderer.

Given to a whore or a young woman he knew?
Not a whore, but poor Gaby, whom a rabid dog bit.
The wound had been cauterized, scarring her arm;
her life saved by injections in a Paris hospital
that her job in the brothel helped to pay for.

And what became of the ear?
It made Gaby faint when she opened the paper,
saw what it contained. She dropped the gift.
It went to the hospital, I read, but couldn’t
be sewn back on. Since then, I don’t know.

*

I suppose it’s nowhere now
though, like Shelley’s heart, or Cromwell’s skull,
or Thomas More’s head, someone may have kept it,
decided they must garder cet object
précieusement
as a keepsake, a touchstone, an almost holy relic,
to be perfumed or bound in special linen
or buried by night in a secret place
away from prying eyes, researchers
and perhaps unbalanced future fans.

Joan McGavin

Note: Van Gogh was living with Gauguin in Arles when the famous incident occurred on December 23, 1888. Gauguin was a keen fencer, lending some credence to the suggestion that he might have sliced the ear off in a fight which was followed by a pact of silence. A diagram drawn by Van Gogh’s physician, Dr. Felix Rey, has recently been found, indicating that the whole ear was cut off. And the identity of the young woman to whom he gave the ear - saying the words quoted in French - has been established. JM

____________________

Marcus and Me

Marcus and me like to wear
three jumpers to school.
The teacher tells me to say
the word warm at least
seven times a day. But Marcus
says that warm is too small
a word, it moves away
too quickly like a mouse.

Marcus says that Anaemia
are little creatures, like lice.
He thinks he’s caught them
by sucking the daisy foam
off my wallpaper.
Mum might have it too,
her pale face and kisses
taste of copper coins.

She doesn’t mind Dad’s
barking. Will it kill her?
Like her too tight shoes or
an Asthma Attack? Marcus
sometimes hides outside
my parents’ room. His ear
to the wall, his finger scraping
the paint off the radiator.

When Marcus and me have
an earache we go to my mum
and kneel like a donkey, my head
sideways on her lap, catching
the splashes one drop,
two drops. Mum rounds up
the wild hair from my ear but
her thumb can’t shut out the thunder.

Saradha Soobrayen

______________________

Hearing aids

When she first got them she wore
them every day like a new
dress, twirling in the racket
and tumble of words like rain.
Now she delays putting them
in for as long as possible.
She likes the cool deep silence
of unravelling iced velvet.
Frank jerks his head and whispers
"Tell gran not to drink her ears”,
nodding conspiratorially
at the plastic snails coiled in a tumbler.
Far away as a pigeon up a tree she shouts
“I haven’t put my ears in."
We know she’ll drink her tea
then loop them up and over
between dry cartilage and
stiff grey perm into deaf ears,
pretending to switch them on.

Emma Cousin

____________________

Hear

I am reading a poem about silence
where Beethoven appears in the last line,
straining to hear his own symphony.
The waiting room is full of muffled coughs,
whispered conversations, the soft tread
of the intern’s surgery slippers on the tiled floor.

The doctor looks deep inside, probes a thin needle
into the inner chamber, applies suction,
I can hear a long roar, then pop. The room is full
of creeks and songs, a sonic hum
I've never heard before, the low tone of dog whistles.
I am Super Ear. The doctor’s voice resonates
inside my body. I carry his clear vowels home

and on the way I try to remember everything
I didn't hear, the thousand daily sounds
that just washed over, or disappeared,
in case I have lost something important,
a phrase that might have changed my life,
the music of a new language.

Tamar Yoseloff

____________________

Ears for the Eyes

We’re out riding, me and you in the New Forest, along a sandy track.

You stop: I see from your ears you have spotted a bird (or two) in the bush way, way ahead, beyond me. Your ears pricking forward, stalky and strained, say it all.

We wait – one of us patient, one of us tense. My legs pressure your sides, asking you to walk us on. Lowering your head, you acquiesce.

You like to scan the land, seeking threats, as when your wide-scoping eye finds the loping dog behind: no sounds find my ears, but yours, flat back, shout high alertso that I tense to your spring forward, your dismissing of the dog-foe, the kick across its bows.

And on we trot.

Yes, you are good at dogs. But not so snakes, masked under cover of heather edging our track. Snakes who, if there, quicken to trit-trotting hooves.

You start, you snort, you spook to the side. Your ears let me down, too quick for me, and sharp down I go, striking the track, vibrating your snakes away.

You wait, regarding me, as if to say it’s safe, it’s safe for you back on my back.

So on we trot.

Stephanie Carey-Kent

____________________

Hear in the Art

Jump red tick
Drum my rib

Jump red tick
Ear in the heart

Jump red tick
Sound me out

Jump red tick
Herd this us

Jump red tick
Bug lug vamp

Claire Crowther

'I saw a red tick and I have a friend with Lyme disease, which has kind of ruined his life except he’s anything but a ruined person, and the tick jumped and looked to me like a heart - shape, colour, jump-jumpiness.' - CC

____________________

Her Earrings

Cautiously - is that the door? -
I quantify her habit:
three boxes with thirty four

pairs (admittedly five from me),
two lonely extras (one mine -
a parrot whose mate flew free

in high winds at Devil’s Dyke)
plus the six she always wears.
Eighty-odd, of which I like

especially the bamboo
drops which, looking so heavy,
yet fall light; the dangle-zoo

with lizards and swinging apes;
the yellow shells - with the surge
of the sea on tap, perhaps –

and the abstracts which make her
a miniature gallery.
But enactments talk louder

than taste; and more than suggest
that of all her adornments
I love this repertoire best –

for what do I tend to buy
as proof? And what does she wear
that I never even try

to take off? In ears we share
a mild imbalance - with which
we’re happy, being a pair.

Paul Carey-Kent

LEND ME YOUR EARS

Or, rather, don't: here are is art which wasn't in the show, but which came to mind in putting it together and afterwards. Let's start with what I would guess are the three most famous paintings on the theme.

Hieronymus Bosch: Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1490-1510

Two enormous ears, pierced by an arrow and cut by a knife, are prominent in the bizarre goings-on in Bosch's Hell. Interpretations of his symbols are speculative, but this contraption has been said to symbolise man's deafness to the New Testament exhortation: 'If any man have ears to listen, let him hear.' Sadly, Bosch's great triptych never leaves Madrid.

Johannes Vermeer: Girl with a Pearl Earring, c. 1665

Not many paintings have inspired a best-selling novel... I suspect it's the way the pearl earring echoes the eyes which makes this the most subtly erotic painting, a well as the most famous, to draw attention to the auricular zone.

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889

The outcome of the most notorious ear incident isn't far way - the Courtauld owns this painting - but arranging a loan might have been awkward... The latest research concludes that Vincent cut off the whole ear, so giving an automatic art reference to the various more recent sculptural treatments of an ear.

Elmgreen and Dragset: Van Gogh’s Ear, 2016, as installed at the Rockefeller Centre in New York

A readymade, if you like, a garden pool complete with ladder and diving board, transplanted to a busy pedestrian plaza and stood upright. The private was made surreally public and the title adds a macabre touch: ‘like the myth of Van Gogh cutting off his ear in despair’, said Elmgreen & Dragset, ‘the dislocated pool will hopefully make people wonder ‘why?’’

Kelvin Okafor: Identity Series - Ear, 2014

Kelvin Okafor is known for his stunningly achieved graphite and charcoal portrait drawings of his friends, such as the exhibition's Katherine's Interlude. Here though is a self-portrait which, paradoxically, shows only his ear, posing the question: how many people could you recognise from such a view?

Vincent van Gogh: Ears of Wheat, 1890

There are actually two strands to van Gogh's ear works, as he painted wheat fields consistently during 1885-90: drawn to biblical parables, his empathy with manual labourers and colour in nature: 'Are we not ourselves very much like wheat... to be reaped when we are ripe?', he asked. This, from his late Auvers-sur-Oise months, is one of his most 'all-over' compositions.

Emmanuel Sougez: Three Ears of Wheat, 1929/30

While we're on cereal, Emmanuel Sougez (1899-1972) was a French photographer known for an intense metaphysical focus on still life objects, as in this monumental, almost architectural, gelatin print of three partial ears of wheat.

Meret Oppenheim: Giacometti's Ear, 1935

Oppenheim befriended Giacometti when she arrived in Paris in 1932, and may be referring to his use of cast body parts in the elegant construction of this ear from other elements. Comparison with photographs of Giacometti suggests, however, that is a far from accurate portrait in terms of his ear-shape, rather normalising the sculptor's own elongated form.

Salvador Dalí: Madonna, 1958

This is an unusual twist on Dalí's paranoiac-critical method of 'systematising confusion' by ambiguating images 'to discredit the world of reality'. For it is a dot abstract up close (which Dalí saw as molecular activity), as well as being both the Virgin Mary and an ear (the Pope's and the one cut from the high priest's servant during Jesus' arrest, in another doubling).

Guillaume Leblon: Portrait, 2016

I can't vouch for the accuracy of French artist Guillaume Leblon's portrait of his young son through the synecdoche of his ear, but I'd be surprised is such a tender portrayal were not accurate in its opaline rose glass. It gives rise to the thought: how many other parts could one use similarly without it looking rather more disturbing than affecting?

Francis Upritchard: from Wetwang Slack, 2018

Francis Upritchard's archeologically-styled installation at the Barbican's Curve Gallery (Wetwang is a a chariot burial site in Yorkshire) included a whole cabinet of ears appearing somewhat untimely ripped, complete with their decoration.

Danielle McKinney: Dreamer, 2021

Typical of the American artist’s concentration on lone black women: here she dreams – one might presume – of the sea as she sleeps in sumptuously-coloured bed linen, built up on a black ground to maximise depth.

David Shepherd: Wise Old Elephant - unlimited print from his 1962 painting

This was the world's best-selling print in the 1960's, launching David Shepherd's career as a wildlife artist and conservationist. His commercial success was built on two failures: when, on leaving school, he travelled to Kenya hoping to become a game warden; and when he was rejected by the Slade on his return to England. Critical acclaim has eluded him, too, but few paintings have such a high proportion of ear.

Joyce Pensato: On the Way, 2008

Mickey Mouse probably has the most famous ears in popular culture, and many artists have used him. Joyce Pensato deconstructs pop art's cartoon icons by crossing them rather brutally with Abstract Expressionism. The battered energy of her charcoal and pastel here leads to a typical balance of humour and grotesquery.

David Altmejd: The Vector, 2022

It isn’t surprising to learn that the hare ears on this human have to be transported separately. Altmejd has adopted the hare as a presiding spirit, seeing it as the Jungian archetype of the Trickster. This yogic hare-man has started to dig a burrow out of what he’s made from as some sort of material-to-spiritual transformation seems presaged.

Gerhard Richter: Gilbert & George, 1975

Curious ear holding features here, from a sequence of portraits of G&G - Richter admires them - which combine multiple photo images to play identity against alienation. Richter didn't pursue the approach further, so this remains unusual in his oeuvre.

Morgan Wills: Listeners, 2019

Given the date, this suggests the anxieties associated with social media rather than Cold War spying. Either way, the many ears suggest an uncomfortable degree of surveillance.

Rachel Maclean: still from Germs, 2013

The ears are often striking parts of Rachel Maclean's many ways of dressing herself up to appear as the only actor in her super-saturated worlds. As a germ, appearing in parody adverts for killing them, does she have five hands, three of them oddly placed - or three hand-like ears, only one curiously located?

Cornel Brudaşcu: Composition with two figures hand and ear, 2021

Cornel Brudaşcu (b.1937), one of the mentors of the ‘Cluj School’ group of younger figurative painters, has a way of using free-floating body parts to produce – at least initially - a more natural, less surreal or disturbing effect than one might expect. Yet I wonder…

Dale Adcock: her slag heap form, 2022

Looks like ants are fetching the sounds from this dream / nightmare ear. As for the title, Adcock chooses them at random from a list of phrases that appeal to him, so nothing auricular should be expected!

Tai Shan Schierenberg: Tipping Point, 2019

Painting big enough (this is 1.8m wide) to highlight the abstract aspects of his sculptural portraits, Tai Shan Schierenberg sets up the potential for a violent confrontation which looks set to be a clash of ears as much as fists.

Juul Kraijer, Untitled, 2006

A bronze sporting not earrings but what we might term 'earringlets' to make up a surprisingly plausible and appropriately classical-looking style.

Jesse Stecklow: Cornspearacy, 2022.

Jesse Stecklow frequently employs the ear as a symbol for information collection, and corn, setting up the link to ‘ears of corn’. Here, two ear prints are affixed to glass cylinders, each containing a readymade corn bottle filled with high fructose corn syrup.

Wendy Mayer: Teapot with Ears, 2019

Wendy Mayer's ceramic is a rare case of ears which cannot hear and yet are useful. Obviously the handle is a plausible visual pun, but the spout also reads that way to me - suggesting the ear's canal externalised.

Markus Vater: Ear, 2020

'I have always been interested in holes', says Markus Vater. 'The ear is a wonderful hole. I like painting ears. It is somewhat strange, as paintings themselves are quiet...'

Jonathan Baldock: from the series Maske, 2020

Jonathan Baldock's witty ceramics push pareidolia to the limit as they merge masks with emojis. Only a minority feature ears, but here they take centre stage...

Jonathan Baldock: Snoutflower, 2026

Baldock is worth a second appearance for his demonstration of how ears can be a porcine nose, confusing the senses in a novel way. Ears have become increasingly prominent in his work...

Euan Uglow: Marigold, 1969

Typically, this night painting reaches what Lawrence Gowing termed Uglow's ‘subversive traditionalism’ by forcing close examination through the process of measurement. Unlike any other Uglow work, though, Marigold features a black model - and centres on her ear.

Suzanne Dworsky: Sea Breeze, 1978

This is from the American photographer's a set of close-cropped images of Cape Cod. What's nice here is the intimacy of focus, enhanced by the rainbow heart, and the implications teed up by the title: of action - through the blown hair - and sound: breeze, breath, waves.

Darcy Whent: Wait There, 2026

Darcy Whent's surreal works, says her gallery, ‘examine the transition between childhood and womanhood. evoking desire, uncertainty and disconnect’. But maybe an adult could also wear this white horse hooked through an earlobe…

Clive Hodgson: Untitled, 2014

Only in the context of the other works is this abstraction likely to appear auricular. Hodgson certainly had no such intention, but its typically prominent signature (calling knowing attention to its making) might then make it a self-portrait of sorts, so I relate it to van Gogh, whereas the following has more of a Vermeer connection...

Jonathan Monk: Pierced Portraits (#22) (Woman with gold earring), 2004

In typically mischievous style, Monk has simply pushed a red drawing pin into a series of found vintage drawings of women, a violent subversion referencing Fontana, playing with the differing realities of image and object, and suggesting some sort of rebellious intent to this mid-20th century subject's earwear. Or is it just that the drawing is sold?

Zulu Ear Plugs

Traditionally, an ear piercing ceremony – and subsequent training of the lobe to take bigger plugs - was a gender inclusive rite of passage and was universally applied throughout Zululand since a person whose ears were not pierced was said to remain foolish and childish and good for nothing. The design of such plugs peaked in the 1940’s-50’s, when they were made from colourful Marley floor tiles sliced into small segments, with each piece then painstakingly pinned to the sides of the wooden plug.

John Deakin: Francis Bacon, 1960

Bacon commissioned his drinking partner Deakin to take photographs he then used as source material, including many of George Dyer - the three of them even holidayed together. He was drawn to the double exposures Deakin sometimes made, and fed some of those effects into paintings.

Kyle Barnes: Reflection, 2022

This is actually oil on canvas painted from a photograph of a model covered in liquid: ‘the subject appears to be reborn’, according to Albemarle Gallery, though less empowered readings are surely possible. But it does emphasise the ear in an interesting way.

Milton Avery: Self-Portrait, 1941

An ear-prominence prize for this self-depiction by Milton Avery (1885-1965). He did have big ears, but they certainly don't leap out in quite this way in the typical photograph. Are they burning with something being said about him elsewhere?

Shona Heath: EYE EAR YOU, 2022 - photo Tim Gutt

This collaboration with MIMBRE acrobats on the streets of Hackney surely wins the 'Best Ear Costume' prize. It was conceived by leading set designer Shona Heath. Ruby Gaskell – who says she is fond of ‘bendy shit’ – is performing within. Eye, Nose and Mouth were just as good, but less relevant here…

Georgia O'Keeffe: Red Hill And White Shell, 1938

Not so much a word in your shell-like as a suggestion that the landscape might be listening to us, just as we should listen to it. That aside, one of O'Keeffe's best meldings of geometry and colour in the guise of representations in which the body never seems far away.

Alex Dordoy: Sleepwalker, 2015

Sticking with shells, this super-delicate application of acrylic and watercolour to a slipper oyster suggests fragile record of night movement, playing on the closeness of the ear to the site of dream formation – and consistent with Dordoy’s wider infection of apparent abstraction with natural forms and narratives.

René Magritte: The Music Lesson, 1965

And staying with the ear's listening function, hear the pinkness of the bell suggests an analogy between clapper and anvil, while the floating through the air is a famous feature of rock in some of Magritte's work, takes on the logic of the medium of sound.

Nairy Baghramian: Spatial Composition, 2026

From a series of assemblages referencing the Polish avant garde artist Katarzyna Kobro, who expanded pictorial space into sculptural architectural reliefs, it is hard not to read this as a red-eared face, complete with unorthodox version of the already unorthodox Mohican hairstyle.

Danh Vo: We the People (detail), 2011-16

This is an ear from Vo's exact but differently distributed replica of the Statue of Liberty, a reframing of the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi's original, composed as it is of 250 separate copper pieces - thus is its symbolism dismantled...

Floryan Varennes: Spikes, 2026

These are elf ears, sharply pointed in concert with the sharp hearing ascribed to elves in fantasy lore. Their separate appearance alludes to wartime rituals in which a severed ear becomes a trophy. Thus is an organ once attuned to sound and perception estranged from its function, transformed into an artifact of power.

Karen Kilimnik: Alectrona, goddess of the sun + beach - yellow marble statue, Versailles with Princess Caroline bows, 1987 and Giant earring, 1987-2018

The Magritte was one kind of giant - and punny - ear-ring. Here's another: Karen Kilimnik's pastel drawing has a velvet bow and rhinestone earring attached, then reprised in combined sculptural form in Velvet, foam, hand-blown glass and steel at a height of 130cm. Fantasy and reality are somehow out of kilter.

Srijon Chowdhury: Ear (Good), 2022

This ear by the Oregon-based Bangladesh-born artist is over three metres high, and the somewhat Blakean goings-on within are taken from his own previous work, retrospectively re-sensed in a series which includes equally monumental eyes.

Sami Parkkinen: Spectrum, 2023

This - rather more beautiful than the average ear photograph - is from the Finnish photographer’s ‘Healing’ series which he sees as ‘investigating our need for spirituality and redefinition of society and humanity as a result of that’. In which context it does suggest some sound beyond the ordinary is reaching the listener.

Wendy Saunders: Untitled (Head in Four Colours), 2018

Wendy Saunders' head is sufficiently close to abstraction that the pink add-on could be a displaced mouth or rotated eye in the spirit of Picasso, but an ear is the most likely reading. The fourth colour is a red stripe on the side not visible here... Unfortunately one of the last works she made before her untimely death in 2019.

Veronika Pausova: Playing the Organs, 2021

Czech born Toronto-based Veronika Pausova uses various isolated body parts – based here on her own ears – to create semi-abstract spaces where the interchange between the physical and cognitive plays out.

Colin Crumplin: Ear (Evander Holyfield), 2000

This references perhaps the most famous ear wound in sporting history - Mike Tyson taking a chunk out of Evander Holyfield's ear in 1997. It also illustrates Crumplin's unique process of matching a semi-randomly generated abstraction with a found image which he then paints in realistic manner - it often takes him years to find a match, so this was pretty quick.

Asger Carlsen: Black Digital, 2015

New York based Asger Carlsen digitally distorts and collages his original photographic material, which he presents as large black and white prints. If this looks like a lump of clay, it's human clay combined with its surroundings, a self-portrait in which Carlsen's nose and a oddly central ear merge with architectural features from his home.

Michael Andres: Cristina Ochoa, 2025

Those ears could grow even bigger… Michael Andres’ portrait of artist Cristina Ochoa shows her with works from her project ‘Cosmic Seed Basket’, which aimed to bring back ‘the spirits of the seeds… as ordered by the elders, the taitas from up heavens and down earth’.

Nancy Fouts in performative mode, all ears at Chelsea School of Art, circa 1970. Fouts (1945-2019) made her name in advertising in the late sixties before returning to the gallery scene this century.

Nickey Deeley: Petal Ear Horns for deep listening, 2021

Carrying on the performative mode, New Zealand based Nickey Deeley extends her powers consistent with her declared preference for 'rural psychedelia'. Maybe they could also act as Dumbo-style wings...

Rosie Gibbens is another performance artist, known for misinterpreting and exaggerating body parts. This, though, is her ear-relevant 2021 advert for a list of recommended podcasts to wile away the locked down time of the covid pandemic.

Oli Epp: ‘Blue Notes (Ellsworth’s Muse)’ 2023

It’s typical of Oli Epp to replace ears with pods, as if technology has taken over and also suggesting a sound track we are left to imagine. Mouths tend to get most of the attention, as he also hides the eyes of his exactingly slick portraits of post-digital characters.

Bruce Nauman: Westermann's Ear, 1968

Bruce Nauman cast the ear of the artist HC Westermann, then surrounded the greenish plaster with a rope which both echoes the loops of the ear and can be read as the completion of a head to make a portrait which might well characterise his friend as a good listener.

Pourea Alimirzaee: Pech Pech, 2022

This ear-pecking watercolour, says the Iranian painter, recalls him coming across a figure in Ghana walking outside with a bird peacefully resting on the shoulder. Alimirzaee likened the bird to a second consciousness ‘sitting on your shoulder and repeating in your ear, how to be, to think, to behave.’

Bill Brandt: Ear in Landscape,1957

One of the most famous - and most surreal - photographs by Bill Brandt (1904-1983) integrates an ear into a tripartite division of pebbly beach and cliffs to dramatic pre-Lynchean effect and a suggestion that we might hear the wave breaking.

Egyptian limestone ear stelae from New Kingdom, Dynasty 18 (1550 – 1995 BCE) – Petrie Museum, London

Such stones were offered to a deity as a sign of thanks, devotion or request for help – sometimes with a single ear, sometimes with hundreds acting as a hotline to the gods. The more ears, the better the signal for communicating your prayers!

Anna Ruth: Even Walls Have Ears, 2025

The artist’s steel frame adds to the solidity of a wall offset by the most discreet of listening ears in the Czech painter’s gentle play on the stock phrase, readily associated with her country's Communist era.

Karel Appel: Mouse on a Table, 1971

Karel Appel gives sculptural form to a typical character from what one might call the CoBrA–pop of his 1970’s work. This ‘object-painting’ is lively from the front, but I prefer the rear view, in which the eyes in the back of the mouse’s head appear in its ears, which probably do act in much that capacity.

F. E. McWilliam: Ear, c. 1935

An attractive cherry wood ear, at a scale that might be a head (33cm high) and also with the appearance of a fuller head as one moves around it. Rather underrated, McWilliam.

Lee Simmonds: Untitled (snails), 2023

The shell-as-ear trope is particularly convincing in this painting. Simmons applies abstract colour as a randomised base and works on that until something figurative emerges – here the underlying green playing an evident role from forest to shell to water.

Claudio Parmiggiani: Winged Painting (Mercury Passing Before the Sun),1982

Those might be the wings of the painting, buy they also act as the eccentric ears of the sculptural head, not to mention the artist’s palettes. One of the poetically conjoined ‘sculpted paintings’ of the Italian artist.

Alexander Calder: The Whirling Ear, 1958

This was installed in the middle of Brussels in 2000, where it carries on turning slowly – one revolution per minute – as if listening to the hub of the city. That makes it one of the most mobile of Calder’s stabiles, or one of the most stable of his mobiles, I’m not sure which.

Fernand Teyssier: Study for an Audible Act, 1964

Fernand Teyssier (1937-88) is an interesting figure in the little-remembered 'new figuration' in France in the 60’s-70’s. Some sort of chain of logic operates here: saws have teeth, connecting them to mouths, and ears listen to mouths. Before you know where you are, you’ve sawn off an ear…

Allessandro Mendini: Face vase, 2012

Mendini’s ‘Proust’ design emerged from an antique armchair conjoined with the pointillist brushstrokes of a painting by Paul Signac – a combination which evoked, for him, the world of ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’. He applied it widely… here ears might be earrings.

Justin Fitzpatrick: A Whisper in the Cloister, 2019

Whereby whatever was said quietly - seems to be causing agitation by getting louder. Could it have been a rumour of scandalous behaviour, consistent with previous work by Fitzpatrick's which has revisited Aquinas' views on sexual sin?

Votive left ear, bronze, Roman, 200 BC - 100 BCE

Votive offerings were presented to a god, either in the hope of a cure or as thanks for one. They were made in the shape of the afflicted body part – in this case a person’s ear.

Hannah Beerman: Handlebars, 2022

Hard not to read these handles as ears, the more so when Magdalena Blazinska, looking with me at this cute combination work at Claas Reiss gallery, mentioned that the same word serves for 'ear' and 'handle' in Polish.

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: Les rumeurs de New York, 2010

Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (c. 1923 – 2014) made many serialised drawings on cardstock, one set of which is multi-eared invocations of rumours from around the world. I saw this one in situ and in Trump's Stormy Daniels time...

Tony Cragg: We, 2016

This is a somewhat atypical Tony Cragg, given he's known for suggesting the face only on careful examination of his 'Rational Beings' series. It's very much the royal we of self-portraits, with 250-odd cragg-heads built into a giant cone-head. It may well have more ears than any other sculpture. So much listening power put me in mind of...

Nedko Solakov: Ears, 2016

Nedko Solakov tells stories which may or may not be literally true, though he has said that he didn't invent his youthful involvement with the Bulgarian Secret Service. That inspired his Top Secret installation made just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which gained attention at Documenta 12 in 2007, and lies behind this combination of aluminium casts and text.

Alicia Radage: Ear Twins, 2022

This silicone would-be-flower is cast from Alicia Radage's own ears, part of a whole meadow of body part bloom. They are stood on a base cast from her breast, the stem formed by curling a hollow brass tube around her arm. A reflection on narcissism and how our self-regard threatens the balance of our lives with nature.

Pat Steir: Self-Portrait, 1987 onwards

Returning to the multi-ear, Pat Steir, best known for her waterfall paintings, has reprised her 1987 self-portrait drawings on several occasions: she has a team - to depersonalise the self-portrait form - draw ears and eyes in black pastel 'as if the walls of the room were inside of the skin of a person', linking this to Buddhist notions of the self.

Jean Siméon Chardin: The Young Schoolmistress, c 1736

As a modern painter of people in rooms, Lucian Freud was drawn to Chardin's quietly precise depictions of domestic life, and made his own version of this painting when given out-of-hours access to the National Gallery in 2000 in order to respond to the collection.

Lucian Freud: After Chardin (Small Plate), 2000 (plus flipped detail of Chardin's The Young Schoolmistress, c 1736

Freud was particularly taken with what he described as 'the most beautiful ear in the history of art' - so much so that he made etched version of not just the whole of Chardin's painting, but the ear in particular. For comparison, I have reversed the Chardin detail in line with the reversal that Freud allowed to remain as a result of the printing process.

Not Vital: The Inside of My Left & Right Ears, 2024 - white Lasa marble

The Swiss artist had noticed his hearing deteriorate at the time of making this inside-out self-portrait, and the result looks a little like hearing aids – as well as reflecting his lifelong fascination with constructing and inhabiting space from within, suggesting the rugged, snow-capped mountains of his native Engadin region, and referring to childhood memories of digging tunnels in the snow.

Juusepe de Ribera: Studies of Two Ears and of a Bat, late 16th century

This study in red chalk and wash suggests the connection between ears and bats which 'Ears for the Eyes' explores in full. It includes the motto FULGET SEMPER VIRTUS - Virtue Shines Forever - which makes for a trickier connection to pin down...

Femmy Otten: The discomfort of rationality, 2016

Dutch artist Femmy Otten mixes mythologies and eras liberally, and there's something of Gaugin's sculpture in this oil on burl wood face-of-sorts. The theme of ear inversion recurs: has the mind gone beyond normal physiognomy as well as its awkward rationality to reach a transcendental space of dream colour?

Eva Kotátková: image from Anatomical Orchestra, 2014

The Czech Eva Kotátková explores how conditions constrain the individual. She says the installation and performances of Anatomical Orchestra explore 'an ill or disabled body, one whose senses are not functioning, as a result of which the body becomes a partially empty shell not able to fully use its potential, or one missing sense becomes replaced by another that’s far more sensitive and developed' - as when a blind man develops enhanced hearing.

Aideen Barry: from Self-Portrait, 2021

Barry's lockdown-inspired Self Portrait suggests the distancing architecture of Zoom by dividing her self across a nine channel moving image installation with nine channel sound by Stephen Shannon presented on nine identical wall mounted monitors. Here's the ear.

Georgina Starr: still from Quarantaine, 2019

This is from a film in which ‘two young women, who start out as strangers but soon become friends, follow each other down a metaphorical rabbit hole into a mysterious parallel universe’. Looks more like a metaphorical earhole here…

Paul Noble: G is for Ear, 2016

On to Starr's partner... Can you call it a pun, to find a letter in something? Of course, G is also for Gear, which may be a background pun you can just about H is for Hear...

Lindsey Mendick: painting from Are You Going to Destroy Me?, 2020

It wasn’t obvious how this related to Mendick's Goldsmiths installation about love and gothic horror, unless it's just that a dandelion-stuffed ear has its own mad lack of logic, but I liked it anyway.

Peter Liversidge: Proposal for Kate McGarry, 2017

Peter Liversidge works from written proposals which set out his intentions for a show: for Kate McGarry he opted to make work inspired by pareidolia - our tendency to read images into abstraction. One wall of many photographs parodies that somewhat, as mouth and eyes are blatantly imposed rather than found - indeed, one pair of eyes reads as ears..

Anna Sew Hoy: Tacit, 2024 - Ceramicware, glaze, Puff Paint, 114 x 78 x 25 cm

'Tacit' means 'implied without being stated', but how much is tacit in this back and forth between what we hear and what we understand, between hearing and listening and comprehending?

John Baldesarri: Beethoven's Trumpet (With Ear) Opus # 133, 2007

This stick-your-head-in sculpture was inspired by Beethoven's own collection of ear trumpets, and is silent until the viewer speaks into it - then a random section from a late Beethoven quartet is heard. It's as if a communicative link has been made, yet if this is the composer's deaf ear, then the surreal absurdity extends from how it looks to what it does...

Ed Paschke: ‘La Chanteuse’, 1981

In this typical work of the Chicago imagist, his colour-heightened version of a projected image from a vast collection of clippings gives us a couple who seem affected by TV static. The man is primarily defined by his listening ear, while our view of the singer focuses just as logically on her mouth…

John Baldessari: Ear Sofa; Nose Sconces with Flowers (in Stage Setting) at Art Basel, 2017

Baldessari gets a double appearance, consistent with his frequent isolation of unglorified body parts within his wider project of investigating the power of context in shaping meaning. Here, I guess, he is also listening to Dali's lips sofa.

Nicolás Guagnini: Hard of Hearing, 2013

Deleuze – see EJ Major for more on him – developed the concept of the body without organs to represent depth over surface. Argentinian Nicolás Guagnini prefers organs without bodies: heaps of ceramic penises, noses and ears. This installation of ‘Heads’ and ‘Hard of Hearing’ at the Lars Friedrich Gallery in Berlin gives the impression that all might have been stolen from ancient statues, consistent with Guagnini’s general appetite for cultural plunder.

Dorothy Cross: Red Baby, 2021

A pillow is carved from a block of Damascus Rose marble, based on Cross’s own childhood pillow and with an ear nestling at the centre where a head would leave an impression. The geological veins, in the Frith Street Gallery's words ‘run towards the ear presenting what seems like a pulsating body of stone’.

Susan Rothenberg: Mouth to Ear, 2001

Rothenberg may be best known for her horses, but bodily fragments frequently feature in her range of archetypes. The effect here is to reduce the act of listening, somewhat disturbingly, to its essence.

Penelope Slinger, I Hear What You Say, 1973 - photographic collage on card, 24 x 19 cm

Penelope Slinger’s anarcho-feminist collages from the 1970’s fell out of view in Britain for 40 years after she emigrated to the US in 1979, but – championed by Riflemaker - have recently featured in several shows. This striking self-portrait is from the series ‘Eat My Words’ (1971-77), which also features eye in mouth and mouth in mouth combinations but not, I think, any attempt on ‘eye in ear’.

George Condo: Mary Magdalene, 2009

I felt ears of this quality should be included here, though why they should belong to a notably serene, bare-breasted Mary Magdalene is unclear.

Mariechen Danz: Lungs, 2018

Berlin-based Irish artist Mariechen Danz's practice centres on performative explorations of how the body is represented in different cultures, epochs, and fields of knowledge. These glass lungs are made at a scale to reinforce their resemblance to ears to suggest the whole body's involvement in our perceptions.

Louise Bourgeois: Rejection , 2001

Louise Bourgeois made sculptures of ears, sure. But she also made heads in which the absence of ears acts as an autobiographical reference to not being heard. From the great series of fabric heads she made in her made in her 80's - 90's.

Jana Euler: " " , 2016

German painter Jana Euler has a way with compellingly experiential body images. Here, in one of a coruscating series of paintings on the theme of the absent centre (and with an absent centre of a title for each in the set) , she collapses a body around a void which pivots on the ears.

David Altmejd: Small Loop with Focus, 2017

The Canadian's 2018 show with Modern Art consisted of white plaster-like reliefs enacting transformation and creation, often with hands making the work of which they were part. Here, though, what look like the conversion of man to floppy-eared dog seems to end up being heard rather than molded.

David Salle: Tennyson, 1983

Over to Salle himself: 'The red shapes at the painting’s left and right edges, like a band encircling the painting from behind, an embrace. Who is Tennyson, and what is he doing here in the sand? The carved ear - what is it listening to? The picture is quiet; a painting tuned to its own frequency'.

Aly Helyer: The Forbidden Ear, 2017

Aly Helyer's distorted and oddly-coloured apparent portraits draw us in to doubts about whether we can pin down a unified self - and in this case an ear seems to arrive from some other place - illegitimately, judged by the title - to complement the Picassoesque line-up of the eyes.

Prunella Clough: Ears, c. 1990

Prunella Clough was good at converting apparent abstraction into simplified figuration by means of a title. Could this shapely scenario, here with more subtly blue-tinged lobes than Helyer gave us, alternatively have been titled 'tree'? As it is, my question is: one person or an ear each from two?

Jonathan Baldock: Candle from 'There's No Place Like Home', 2017

Jonathan Baldock's second appearance... his installation at CGP's Dilston Grove project space tweaked the formative psychodramas of childhood. It included a version of the candles his grandmother used to make, big enough that you almost lose the delicately waxed ears, which are at full human size (indeed Baldock told me he sought out especially large and prominent ears to cast).

Wolfgang Tillmans: Outer Ear, 2012

This typical Tillmans, perhaps the simplest image in my selection, scores for the casually intimate portrayal of the slightly downy aspect which hints at the ear's nibblability - if that's a word...

(found by) Mauro Bonachina: Untitled, 2018

This move into further intimacy is one of the many striking images, one per day, sourced and posted by the artist Mauro Bonachina on his Instagram account. And each connects up cunningly to the next in a chain of wit...

Richard Deacon: Tall Tree in the Ear, 1984

This two part sculpture isn't so much tree and ear as, according to Deacon, a title which fits the work as 'the shiny metal could be aerial and the blue could be sky or water, and the shape could be an ear or whatever, and the height is the height of the tree'. But it was 'the difference between the inside and the outside as the material gathers on the inside' that he thought was the interesting bit - which does suggest how what we hear isn't simply what arrives.

Albano Hernandez: Anonymous, 2024

This - at London’s Palmer Gallery - is an installation of 315 plastic ear tags, as used to track cattle. They are arranged to show the graph of the dramatic rise in meat production over the preceding seventy years, a trend with significant environmental and agricultural consequences. The tags, now the sole record of the animals they represented, act as an anonymous cemetery.

Ad Minoliti: The Ears, 2018

Argentine artist Ad Minoliti often lays geometric shape over human imagery to alter its context. This reverses that rather, putting ears over an abstract painting which could also be a room. There's typically a sub-text of queering traditions, though I'm not sure how that operates here...

Woody De Othello: Great Soul, 2023

Even given this figure has three legs, that's a lot of ears. If, that is, it is a figure - De Othello's surreal japes are domestically inspired, and that could be a multi-handled vase on a stand rather than a humanoid.

Olafur Eliasson: cover design for Peggy Gou’s album ‘I Hear You’, 2024

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson is a close friend of the Korean house DJ and producer Peggy Gou: he directed - and dances in - the video for her single '1+1=11', as well as designing the ‘ring of ears’ on the album artwork.

Pieter Hugo: Escort Kama, Enugu, Nigeria, 2008

This is from South African photographer Pieter Hugo's 'Nollywood' series, for which he asked a prolific director to help him work with actors from the world's third largest film industry - Nigeria makes 1,000 films a year. The scenes are staged melodramatically as myths in which everything is exaggerated - here including the ears - yet that could be just the documentation of a highly theatrical movie.

Roger Ballen: Dersie and Casie Twins , Western Transvaal,1993

Yet perhaps that wasn't such an exaggeration... It's hard not to focus on the ears in the most famous of Roger Ballen's images of rural white South African communities in the apartheid years, which focused on the failure of the regime to treat equitably even the whites who didn't fit the agenda of the privileged class. One was working inside, one outside when Ballen came across them, hence the contrast in shirts.

David Lynch: still from Blue Velvet, 1986

Cathy Lomax, who invited me to put together 'Ears for the Eyes', combines the worlds of film and painting, so it seems only fair to conclude with the most famous cinematic organ of hearing: Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) discovers a severed ear in Blue Velvet's opening scene, and it triggers a journey into the seedy underbelly behind suburban appearances. You never know where an ear will lead...

Ways of Seeing: Echolocation

Of all the mammals, bats are probably still considered the most unpopular. Nevertheless, they are also one of the most extraordinary and we are fortunate to have 18 species in the UK.

Using a high frequency system called echolocation, bats are able to see in the dark by using their ears. Echolocation works in a similar way to sonar. Bats make calls as they fly and listen to the returning echoes that bounce off objects or prey to build up a sonic map of their surroundings. They emit sounds through an open mouth, at a frequency too high for adult humans to hear, and use their ears as receivers. A bat can tell how far away something is by how long it takes the sounds to return. Individual bat species echolocate within specific frequency ranges that suit their environment and prey types so we can distinguish different types of bat using bat detectors. Most bats, including the well-known pipistrelle and long-eared species, operate in the range 40-50 kHz, but British bats are spread from as low as 20 kHz for the Noctule Nyctalus noctula to 110 kHz for the Lesser Horseshoe Rhinolophus hipposideros.

Alli Sharma: Brown Long-Eared Bat, 2017

The volume of calls also varies. The Brown Long-Eared bat Plecotus auritus is our most distinctive species, medium-sized with very long ears. The ears are nearly as long as the body but when at rest they curl their ears back or tuck them away completely under their wings, leaving only the pointed inner lobe of the ear (the tragus) visible. Sometimes called ‘whispering bats’, they have developed a very quiet echolocation system, which is inaudible to moths and other prey, but not to them, thanks to the evolution of their own enormous ears.

Alli Sharma

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Images of Sound

Where is the ear?

One thing, it is rarely singular. Humans, like most animals, tend to have a pair. A set, in the case of humans, of strange appendages protruding more or less obviously from the head connected to inner canals which facilitate the transmission of vibration and sound signals to the brain, the organ of exchange.

When I hear what you hear do we imagine the same? If I shut my eyes and listen to the voice of John Pilger, I see Clive James. You? What separates what I hear from what I see? For Gilles Deleuze what is more interesting is their interrelationship and to impose a separation is to falsify experience. For a hearing person you might say. To some extent yes, but the deaf community also talk of an awareness of condensed inner speech. A voice that can be heard in the mind may not sound the same to all.

Gilles Deleuze calls sound signals, like visual signals, or any other stimuli for that matter, images. A more accurate description would be images of sound as it suggests both matter and its memory in a constant state of becoming. This becoming-nature of things is the continuum of being. Deleuze’s conception stems from Bergson whose materialist philosophy collapses the typical dualities of Western thought, subject and object, body and brain, reality and the virtual, image and its perception. In place is a coexistence of tenses within an unfolding present, never static, never given and received in equal measure but giving and receiving together, all at once and at the same time.

As I write I have one of Beethoven’s Piano Trios playing. Ladah deedo dee doodley do, deedodeedo ladade doode doode doode doode do. Hear it? For the most part I don’t. My focus is here. However, playing music with lyrics when I write interrupts my thoughts. Hardly unique but I may not be the same as you in this regard. Relations, says Deleuze, are what matter but they are constantly in flux. Relations operate both normatively and subjectively. The visual or sound image suggested to one mind is particular even when it is similar. This is Deleuze’s difference and repetition, wherein repetition as sameness extends into difference. They co-exist.

Deleuze saw in cinema a means through which to envisage thought. Despite perhaps the dark theatre, movement and time do not stop whilst a film plays, though it may feel like they do. Cinema, far from being a closed set, simultaneously implicates what lies outside. This movement implicit in the Whole breaks down the separation between spectator/actor, real/imaginary, sound/vision, fact/fiction. The brain is the organ of exchange with which we receive, interpret and create simultaneously. The Whole becomes the Open where nothing rests. Cinema, Deleuze suggested, is an externalization of the narrativization of life that we do with our eyes, ears and minds all the time.

I’m still wondering, where is the ear?

EJ Major

Beautiful Ears

The peculiar looking openings on the sides of our head are not obviously attractive and exactly what constitutes a beautiful ear is not as easy to define as an eye, mouth or nose. The main aesthetic ear worry is that they are too large, oddly shaped or protruding, and surgery (referred to as otoplasty or pinnaplasty) to ‘correct’ the position of ears is one of the most commonly performed cosmetic procedures. The tradition, it seems, is for ears to be discreet. Sometimes as Madge Garland in her book The Changing Face of Beauty points out, women’s ears vanish for a century at a time, hidden by curtains of hair in the Victorian era or under coifs and hoods during the Tudor era.

When ears are on show their primary beauty function is as a receptacle for jewellery, which is usually attached by piercing the ear, one of the oldest known forms of body modification. Faces are our identity and an earring, as the piece of jewellery that sits closest to our face, can be seen as a kind of frame. In the grand tradition of nonsensical beauty advice, theories about which earrings you should wear abound. The website jewellerypassion.net states that

• Long earrings optically elongate the face and neck. They are suitable for women with round faces and short necks.

• Earrings with geometric shapes sharpen the features. If your features are angular, you can soften them by wearing round or oval earrings.

• If your face is long, small round earrings are the ones for you, while ladies with the square face type should go for long, dangling earrings.

• Large earrings are great for faces with small features. Massive ones should be worn without a necklace.

• Brunettes can bravely wear earrings with brightly coloured gems, while blondes should stick to the light-coloured ones.

• Young girls can wear earrings of any material, while mature ladies should only wear jewels fashioned out of precious metals and stones.

Luckily most people take no notice of such unscientific rules, a position exemplified by Elizabeth Taylor, who had what could justifiably be called a jewellery addiction. Taylor’s earrings, which came in all shapes and sizes and were often made from the most precious materials, really do seem to accentuate her classical looks and beautifully coloured eyes. ‘I’ve always loved dangling earrings’, she recounts in the book Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair with Jewellery, ‘I wanted a pair of what I call chandelier earrings… I tried on these long earrings and the more I swished my head back and forth, the more they twinkled… I was smitten…. And these were paste – not even real diamonds.’ A couple of months later back in New York, Liz looked for her earrings. She eventually found them but, she told her then husband Mike Todd, they felt different. ‘He chuckled and told me he had taken the paste ones and had them made up with real diamonds.’ Thus the Mike Todd diamond ear pendants were born.

Image of Liz with earrings

In the endless search for newness, where everything has been done to eyes, cheeks and lips, the humble ear has taken on a new role in the world of high fashion. At the 2014 Paris Fashion Week ear makeup became a micro trend. ‘Designer Anthony Vaccarello sent his models down the runway with graphic, inky lobes... Makeup artist Tom Pecheux was going for a quasi jewellery look. Kind of like a second-skin ear cuff’, wrote Lauren Valenti at marieclaire.com. Pecheux’s black lobes were influenced by Douglas Gordon’s photograph series Three Inches Black, which shows a finger tattooed entirely in black as though it has been dipped in ink. To create his graphic black ear look Pecheux coloured in the bottom half of the models' earlobes with a liquid liner pen. Then reported Sophia Panych at allure.com, ‘to make it look more luxurious and less aggressive, he covered the liner in a chunky, iridescent black glitter.’ Pecheux’s ground breaking lobes made the ear a legitimate site for makeup and in Spring 2016 superstar makeup artist Pat McGrath created a silver statement ear for Louis Vuitton, while at Opening Ceremony Yadim applied full glitter ears to her models.

Image of Black ear makeup

So far so ornate but away from the exaggerated other-worldly looks of the high fashion catwalk the ear has also featured in the ridiculous world of reality star self-obsession where the make-up ideal is less Leigh Bowery and more perfect CGI mask. In early 2016 it was reported that Kylie liked to apply makeup to her ears. Contouring, for the uninitiated, is a makeup technique that has become something of a Kardashian trademark. It is akin to painting and involves applying different coloured products to the face to emphasise shadows and highlights. Kylie later revealed that she didn’t actually contour her ears, rather her makeup artist applied foundation to them so they matched her face rather than the red carpet.

Image of Kylie Jenner’s ear

This is where makeup application drifts from artistry to pointless self-obsession. In February 2016 the Daily Mail reported on two models experimenting with contouring each other’s ears. Charlie Lankston described the results: ‘I just went with trying to emphasise the existing shadows, in the same way that I would do when contouring my face. However, while the results were visible - upon very close inspection - both Lindsey and I surmised that the entire process of actually applying the make-up to the ear took a lot more effort than either of us would care to take on a normal everyday basis.’

Cathy Lomax

Emma Cousin reading at the opening

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MATTERS OF WORDS

2026-09-15T02:41:47.288-07:00

See 'P' for 'plumicorn' - this Little Owl doesn't have them, but many owls do...

This collection of words operates mostly through a triple motion:

* Randomly flick through a dictionary until my interest is piqued by a word I do not know

* Search online for an appropriate image

* Expand on what occurs to me, below the image, with notes as necessary.

Alternatively, I sometimes I come across new words of interest while out and about or reading; and a couple of the words may not exist, e.g. my wife and I created ‘praeterita’. Of course, I may have been ignorant of some widely-known words: judge for yourself...

Started January 2022, added alphabetically other than the introductory proem. As of March 2025, there are 185 words here. I think I'll go on towards a round 200...

Proem

By way of exordium, foreword, introduction, preface, prelude, prologue or warm-up comes this attractive yet rarely seen word for the preamble to a book or speech - or better still, perhaps, a long poem. Here, though, it analphabetically heads an alphabetical list of words.

‘Proem’ throws up no images of interest in its primary meaning. The somewhat spectral presence is that of the musician Proem, regarded as an early member of the American IDM scene – that is ‘Intelligent Dance Music’, to sneak in a potential member of the alternative compilation CONA, the Concordance of Nifty Acronyms.

Ablaut

'Ablaut' is a noun describing the alternation in the vowels of related word forms. In English, that is most apparent in the instinctively-followed 'rule of ablaut reduplication' - that if there are two related words and the first has an ‘I’ and the second is either ‘A’ or ‘O’. Thus chit-chat, dilly-dally, clip-clop, flip flop, knick knack, mish-mash, sing-song, ping pong, pitter-patter, riff-raff, tick-tock (or, indeed, TikTok), flim-flam and zig-zag. If there are three words then vowel order goes I, A, O: ding dang dong, bish bash bosh, splish splash splosh.

‘Splish splash splosh’ turns out to be a rather popular title for children’s books. Is that because it follows the rules of reduplication? No doubt ablaut it.

Abscission

Abscission is the natural separation of parts from a plant, typically dead leaves and ripe fruit. The word derives from the Latin abscindere, to abscind or cut way – also the root of ‘scissors’.

So why do leaves fall from trees? The answer lies in the fact that leaves don’t simply fall off or get blown away from deciduous trees, they are actively thrown off by the tree. Shorter, colder days trigger the hormone abscisic acid, which sends a chemical message to every leaf causing ‘abscission’ cells to appear – a thin line of bumpy cells that push the leaf, bit by bit, away from the stem. Any breeze is just accelerating the task. Why dispose of the leaves at all? Because otherwise they will take up water during a comparatively warm spell of winter weather, which will freeze when it gets colder. The leaves will then die, making them useless but with no mechanism to replace them. So the tree will die. Evergreens, on the other hand, have their leaves tightly rolled into needles that resist cold and can conserve water, helped by a waxy coating that reduces evaporation. Such needles resist cold and stay moist, keeping them green throughout the winter.

Abulia

Where to start for real? One could argue that indecision is itself a decision, in which case abulia, a state of pathological indecisiveness, might be logically impossible. So I had my doubts, but that moment of abulia was enough to persuade me to include the word…

Paul Klee is the art master of arrows. These variable pointers form a tentative balance in ‘Schwankendes Gleichgewicht’ (Unstable Equilibrium), 1922.

Acnestis

Acnestis refers to the area on an animal's back, typically between the shoulder blades, that the animal cannot reach to scratch itself. It's the spot that often leads to rubbing against objects for relief. Humans have a small – or even non-existent – acnestis – I reckon I can scratch everything but the trickiest bit is as shown. On the other hoof, I would think a horse or cow’s acnestis is pretty large.

From the Greek ‘aknestis’ - spine.

Agrestal

Cornflowers sound as if they are named to be agrestal. But couldn’t the word apply usefully to many people, those who go a little feral as they chafe against the restrictions of their conventional settings?

Agrestal: growing wild in a cultivated field

Altricial

A young animal hatched or born helpless and requiring significant parental care is termed ‘altricial’, as opposed to ‘precocial’ species, which are immediately capable of moving around and feeding themselves. Among birds, for example, there’s a big difference between altricial songbirds and precocial ducks and chickens. Wikipedia explains the generic pros and cons: ‘Precocial animals' brains are fully developed at birth relative to their body size, limiting their knowledge largely to their instincts but providing them immediate access to their bodies. However, as adults, their brains do not develop any further, and they memorize little from birth to death. Altricial animals' brains are comparatively undeveloped at birth, thus their need for care and protection, but their brains immediately begin developing at birth and do so independently, adapting to individual circumstances, and hence as adults, altricial animals attain more versatile brains than their precocial counterparts, capable of strategic thought based on experience. Thus altricial species, ultimately, possess greater potential for skill and adaptability, which is notably a factor in human developmental success.’ That does leave the question: do songbirds utilise those advantages in ways that chickens and ducks don’t? Perhaps that’s the key to learning to sing?

The picture is of a sparrow hatchling. 'Altricial' is a handy word, but how different is it from 'nidiculous'? I have generously included both...

Amphisbaenian

Ever heard of amphisbaenians? Me neither, until I came across them at the Natural History Museum. They may look like primitive snakes or ‘worm-lizards’ (as they’re sometimes called) but amphisbaenians are a separate group of – mostly legless - subterranean squamates. Their distinctive skin is made up of rings of scales (annuli) that form a tube in which the loosely attached trunk of the body moves, enabling burrowing to be achieved with an accordion-like motion. Amphisbaenians burrow head-first, and different species have different skull-shapes suited to how they go about it: the ‘shovel-heads’ dig by forcing the head forwards and slightly downwards; the ‘spade-heads’ use their sharp-sided head to shave off soil from the front of the tunnel in an oscillatory motion; ‘keel-heads’ dig by ramming their laterally compressed heads forwards; and ‘bullet-heads’ (the majority of amphisbaenians) use the head as a battering ram, followed by pushing it in different directions to pack soil. Rudimentary, deeply recessed, eyes allow them to detect light, but little more – yet that is practical enough for their fossorial lifestyle, which depends on using powerful, interlocking teeth to tear chunks out of larger prey. The name is derived from Amphisbaena, a mythical serpent with a head at each end—referencing both the manner in which amphisbaenians’ tails truncate, and their ability to move just as well in reverse as forwards.

The species illustrated is the Tropical Worm Lizard (Amphisbaena spurrelli), one of 200 species in the group.

Ankh

It’s a popular motif for amulets – yet until I arrived at the word I couldn’t have named this particular cross, shaped like a T with a loop at the top (if cross it is, you could argue about that). It led me to consider the categorisation of crosses in general, several of which I could equally not have cleped (to sneak in another unusual word)…

That's Rihanna overdosing on the ankhs. The singular ‘ankh’ is the conventional Anglicisation of the Egyptian noun ꜥnḫ - hieroglyphically rendered as above, and meaning ‘life’.

Amourette

‘Will you marry me, Jason?’

‘The sleek Triumph Amourette Range combines elegance with sophistication to create a must have for every woman's lingerie drawer’ – but not for long, I suppose, for ‘amourette’ is defined as a trifling and ephemeral love affair.

To take a notorious example of amourette action, in 2004, Britney Spears and Jason Alexander - apparently in a state of some intoxication - were married at her instigation. It lasted 55 hours before being annulled on the grounds that Spears ‘lacked understanding of her actions, to the extent that she was incapable of agreeing to the marriage.' Of the various models in Amourette adverts, I’ve chosen the one who looks most like Britney. She’s wearing a 10166797 Triumph Amourette 300 W Bra. It sounds too good to be short-lived: according to Swiss manufacturer Triumph International the bra offers ‘a comfortable and contemporary fit and feel, paired with chic and intricate, feminine styling… The soft semi-sheer lace is both attractive and comfortable. The stunning neckline flatters and accentuates your curves for a delicate everyday lingerie look’. Looks pretty ordinary to me.

Apophatic

This is a word used in a specific religious context: apophatic knowledge of God is obtained through negating concepts that might be applied to Him – as opposed to cataphatic theology, which concentrates on God’s positive attributes. The apophatic approach is often mystical one, concerned with the divine reality beyond the realm of ordinary perception. The 9th-century theologian John Scotus Erigena provides a flavour, stating that ‘Literally God is not, because He transcends being’. It makes me wonder what else might be approached in this way. Starvation, I suppose, is an apophatic diet. Anyway, not the simplest of concepts to illustrate pictorially and a direct image search revealed little of interest. I was, however, attracted to the diagram to explain the ‘negative vector’, which came up when I looked for an image for ‘define by negation’. It’s a pleasantly simple bit of maths: a negative vector has the same magnitude as the reference vector but faces the opposite direction. Some sort of exchange between early and heavenly realms might be implied.

Apricate

If any animal appreciates aprication, it must be the cat. Why? They sleep for up to 15 hours a day, not so much because domestic cats are worn out by sidling up to their bowls, as because that pattern is retained from their forbears’ activity in the wild: intense crepuscular hunting action offset by long periods of energy conservation and recharging. Those wild felines from which they evolved lived in the Middle Eastern desert some 100,000 years ago, and they’ve also kept an inbuilt preference for warmth. More specifically, a cat’s body temperature drops while it dozes, and lying in the sun tempers this, keeping them more comfortable.

That sleep is actually of two types. 75% is a shallow, almost-waking rest called slow-wave sleep (SWS). Cats doze in a kind of ready position during 15-30 minute catnaps, their senses of smell and hearing in the ‘on’ mode, ready to react instantly. Only 25% is deep REM-reaching sleep, in small periods broken up by dozing. Oh yes… apricate: to sunbathe or bask in the sunshine.

Astacology

The first lesson, I guess, in the study of crayfish is to observe that they are crustaceans, not fish, but that the word ‘crayfish’ comes from settlers mishearing the ‘veice’ part of the old French ‘escreveice’. Perhaps another common name would be better for the Palinuridae, and an attractive option is the US dialect term ‘crawdad’ or ‘crawdaddy’. The second lesson might be that crawdaddies can be surprisingly colourful motherfuckers…

Astacology – the investigation and analysis of crayfish. The modern French word for crayfish, 'écrevisse', derives from the Old French 'escreveice'.

Augend

From the gerundive of ‘auger’, to increase, comes 'augend'. The OED’s rather elegant definition is ‘the quantity to which an addend is added’. And I can see this being a useful word. If you hear prices have gone up by 5% and your beer is now £6 and you want to know what you would have paid before, you will doubtless divide the given amount (£6.00) by its corresponding percentage (105%) and multiply by 100. Thus, £6.00 ÷ 105 = £0.05714, x 100 gets you to £5.71. In practice it was probably £5.70. Perhaps you remember that, but you could ask the barman either ‘what was the price last week?’ or ‘what was the augend of beer prior to the recent price increase?’ Either way, he will reply: ‘£5.70’, furrowing the brow just a tad more if you opt for the latter formulation.

This word got here by a so-far-unique route: I woke up with a dream in which I had added ‘augend’ to this blog. It sounded a plausible word, probably one I should have known. I looked it up in the OED, and here it is. An online image search came up with the nifty setting out of terms and the mathematically-named craft beer ‘Augend & Addend’. It’s a barley wine (the augend) with the improbable addition of fried peanuts (the addend), as made by Red Button Brewery. There seemed to be some colour-empathy drawing them together…

Aventail

Has the time come, as Covid masking retreats, for the return of the aventail, out of fashion for 600 years? It does, after all, cover pretty much the negative of a medical mask: what better to celebrate on the catwalk when we get clear of using those?

An aventail is a flexible curtain of mail attached to the skull of a helmet that extends to cover the throat, neck and shoulders. Aventails were most commonly seen on bascinets in the 14th century and served as a replacement for a complete mail hood. By the dawn of the 15th century, the plate-armoured neck guard of the Great Bascinet replaced the aventail.

Barbicels

This is what ratites (qv) lack. In most birds, the larger feathers consist of a shaft (rachis) bearing branches (barbs) which bear smaller branches (barbules). The smaller branches themselves bear tiny hook-bearing barbicels, which interlock with the barbules of an adjacent barb. Down has no barbicels, resulting in fluffy feathers which provide insulation. But in flightless birds the wing feathers have also evolved to be fluffy and ornate rather than tightly interlocking to support flight. That, in turn, is the basis for the commercial appeal of ostrich feathers… It does mean, though, that even if ostriches had the wing span needed to enable them to fly – probably up to ten metres rather than the two metres they currently sport – and the ability to flap them adequately, they still couldn’t fly. No wonder they gave up.

Beteem

Wd we stell enderstend eech ether ef the enly vewel were ‘e’? Eesy-peesy, es es here beteemed.

My guess is that the only word people might have trouble with above is one in which no substitute ‘e’s are involved: 'to beteem' is to accord / vouchsafe / allow.

Blepharoplasty

‘Before and after’ shots of blepharoplasty – surgical repair of eyelids – tend to be whole face comparisons. I rather like comparing the same eye before and after, but with the ‘after’ shot flipped to make a reasonably coherent face that has a comparison built in. Of course, it looks a bit odd, but that’s plastic surgery for you!

Bocage

In ceramics, bocage works are sylvan scenes, i.e. featuring woodland behind figures or animals. English and continental porcelain figures of the eighteenth century often had trees and leaves, both as a colourful ornamental backdrop and to support the figures during kiln firing. By the 19th century, trees were added more for their ornamental appeal than practical advantage. Peak production in that mode was from 1815 to 1845.

The example here is Staffordshire pottery from 1820, featuring a courting couple under the title ‘Persuasion’. The female figure looks coy as her potential husband proffers a gold ring. Her dog observes expectantly.

Boggart

Do you know your gnomes from your pixies, your silkies from your banshees, your brownies from your boggarts? The history of such lore is complicated, as set out most fully in Katherine Briggs’s ‘Dictionary of Fairies’. Nor is it static: the default convention of small, sweet, flighted child-friendly creatures is a Victorian one, displacing many more malevolent varieties from the popular consciousness. Brownies are a species of household hobgoblin according to Briggs, little rough, hairy men who come at night to do the housework in exchange for a small portion of food. If offended – for example by failure to leave out food, or deliberate insult - they can turn into boggarts: mischievous household spirits who play tricks and are very difficult to get rid of – ‘many families have fled from a house tormented by a boggart, only to find the boggart fleeing with them’. They delight in tormenting those they once protected and will cause milk to sour, doors to slam and dogs to go lame. You have been warned...

The illustration by Tony DiTerlizzi comes from The Spiderwick Chronicles, an American series of eight children’s novels set in the fairy world, written by him with Holly Black and published 2003-09.

Bolus

For over fifty years I thought of this word in English purely as a proper noun – more precisely, as the surname of Brian Bolus (1934-2020), a solid opening batman who scored 25,598 runs during a twenty year first class career with Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. I also vaguely recall from my ‘O’ Level in the language that bolus is Latin for ‘ball’. Yet only during a recent hospital stay did I hear it used – by a doctor – as a common noun: it’s the small rounded mass of food and saliva that forms in mouth during the process of chewing. Many cricketers believe they perform better if they chew gum. I’m not sure if Brian did, but if so it suggests the faintly ludicrous hat-trick of Bolus chewing on a bolus to help him deal with the bolus…

Bolus’s batting style was more block than blast, more grit than elegance. After retiring, he was a regular on cricket’s after-dinner circuit, and always started with the same line: ’For those of you who saw me bat, let me apologise.’ Gum wouldn’t have turned him into a swashbuckling attacker, but does it actually aid performance at the margins? Aside from the imitation of famous players, six reasons have been cited for the cricket habit. It helps players stay calm, by providing a simple mechanical stress reliever; can contain a sugar-based energy boost; indirectly encourages players to remain hydrated – because gum makes you salivate more than usual, making you thirstier than usual, making you drink more; helps the whole body ‘get into a rhythm’; improves reflexes - chewing gum helps increase brain activity, so messages are sent to different body parts quicker; helps players remain focused by keeping the mind occupied on an easy task which stops them switching off – most relevantly while fielding in slow-moving matches. The Ancient Romans might have chewed gums of some sort – the habit goes back well before gums were first manufactured in the 1840’s – but they didn’t, of course, play cricket. Romans’ primary sporting use of the bolus was harpastum, a keep-ball game of territorial possession.

Breviloquence

Nice word.

Breviloquence: brevity of speech. The image shows South Korean actor So Ji-sub, who has gained a reputation for short speeches at award ceremonies - he has only ever used the two words: ‘thank you’. I say two words: some might argue it is just the one. Properly speaking, though, ‘thank you’ as a verb phrase is two words, and ‘thankyou’ is either an adjective (‘a thankyou note’ or a noun ‘he sent the flowers as a thankyou’. There are various ways to say 'thank you' in Korean, come to that, but I'll stop there.

Bulla

I’ve had one, but without the language to call it anything more specific than a blister. Actually, though, a vesicle is a circumscribed elevation of skin of 0.5 cm or more in diameter containing a liquid, and a bulla is the same thing but over 0.5cm – it’s just a size thing. Actually, I didn't measure it, so maybe I've only had a vesicle. As for what the illustration shows, it depends I guess on how big your screen is. Either way, this is a modest example: it's easy enough to find extreme skins problems online, if that's your thing.

Byss

If an abyss appears bottomless, it makes sense that a byss is the ground or bottom of something – though it’s a very rare word – rare enough to put ‘abyss’ in the attractive category of ‘lonely negatives’ - words that exist only in the negative form, as the positive form has fallen out of fashion or does not exist. ‘Unruly’, ‘disgust’ and ‘indelible’ are others…

The image shows the planet of Byss, as featured in Star Wars – that’s the bulk what comes up in an Internet search for the word. It doesn't look utterly unlike Earth, but is the fifth planet of the Beshqek system, and is described on a fansite as ‘enshrouded in the dark side of the Force, located within the isolated and nearly inaccessible Deep Galactic Core at the end of the Byss Run, a heavily guarded artificial hyperlane kept open by hundreds of non-mass S-thread boosters, connecting the planet to the Core Worlds. The planet was otherwise nearly impossible to reach safely through hyperspace, due to the high density of stars in the Deep Core and the constantly shifting patterns of the region's natural hyperlanes.’ Star Wars is, of course, a whole world of its own…

Caballine

In scientific terms, the wild horse is equus ferus, a sub-species of which is the domesticated horse, equus caballus. So – although the words don’t seem to be employed with the precision that they might be – the common adjective ‘equine’ could logically be used for ‘pertaining to horses’ generally, and the rarer adjective ‘caballine’ for ‘pertaining to domesticated horses’ specifically. In fact, both equus and caballus translate from the Latin as ‘horse’, and the two words are used with unequal frequency but similar meaning. Yet I came across ‘Caballine’ in a context where that putative distinction made full sense. According to Natalie Lawrence in the 10 February 2026 issue of the TLS ‘Horses remained wild for thousands of years after dogs, goats, cattle and even cats had become domesticated. Once they were tamed c.4,200 years ago, however, they rapidly became engines of civilization, displaced only by machines in the post-industrial era. They powered the intercontinental expansion of agriculture, armies, trade and belief systems. So great has their influence been that the historian Reinhart Koselleck proposed dividing human history into the “pre-caballine”, “Caballine” and “post-caballine” ages.’

The New Forest Pony isn’t as wild as all that: it is categorised as equus caballus. So here’s the caballine presence in our lives: Flynn.

Caecilian

Rather as amphisbaenians (qv) are the least-known reptiles, the caecilians (Latin for ‘blind ones’ – say ‘seh-SILL-yens’) are the least-known amphibians, even though the 200 species of Apoda constitute one of just three living groups - alongside Anura (frogs and toads) and Urodela (salamanders and newts). They look pretty much like amphisbaenians, too: legless and vermiform, somewhere between snake and worm. Many are born with short, blunt teeth, used peel off the outer layer of the mother’s thick skin – which doubles in thickness prior to birth - for food. Up against the matriphagy (qv) of young pseudoscorpions, dermatotrophy seems a sensible compromise. That aside, they spend their time under ground or water in lifestyles requiring minimal vision and attracting minimal attention.

Calescent

When I came across ‘calescent’ in Claire-Louise Bennett’s 2021 novel ‘checkout 19’, I didn’t know it. But I predict the word will take off, describing as it most economically does the condition of the world during global warming.

Calescent: increasing in heat. The picture shows a geothermal power plant in Iceland: a more benign form of calesence – indeed, a sustainable source of energy, the maximisation of which could help to offset temperature rises.

Cannula

I won’t claim not to have heard this word before time in hospital made it part of my day-to-day, but I tended to confuse it with ‘catheter’ and wasn’t sure how to spell it. The Latin origin is key to that: it means ‘little reed’, and is a tube inserted into a vein for delivery of fluids. When you have both wrists so decorated they are the consistently Latinate ‘cannulae’. The tricky bits then are sleep and movement. I’ve found that, when the fluids are being pumped in, the intravenous (IV) delivery mechanisms set off an alarm at any suspicion of the wrong movement, so waking me: sleeping without moving either arm inappropriately is quite a challenge. The IV stand is on wheels and can be pulled along easily enough for short trips to the loo. Long distances are awkward, though, and stairs are another matter: Southampton General Hospital’s lobby notices state that the lifts are ‘for staff and visitors only’, leaving patients to use the stairs – though I decided this could be safely ignored if my stand and I wished to pop down to the paper shop.

In fact the words are close: both 'cannula' and 'catheter' can be defined as 'a flexible tube inserted into the body to administer or withdraw fluids'. But in general practice ‘cannula’ is the word used when this is to enable fluids to be fed into the blood, whereas catheters are used to drain fluid out; and the cannula is almost always in the arm, whereas most catheters are inserted into the bladder to remove urine. The illustration is of a typical mobile IV unit.

Chape

The chape of a buckle is the part where it is attached to an object like a belt or a shoe. Attachment to enable function is of course vital in many spheres, from IT interfaces to means of communication to plugging in machinery - the criticality of chapes!

Chechia

Until recently, if you’d asked me what the hat on the left was called, I would probably have said ‘a fez’. And that, revealing a reprehensibly Western cultural bias, would have been because Tommy Cooper was known for wearing something similar - though I might, if pressed, have recalled that such hats have a long administrative and military history in the Near East. However the fez - on the right in the above pairing - is rigid and cylindrical as well as peakless and usually red with a black tassel attached to the top. The chechia – which varies in colour according to country, but is traditionally red in Tunisia - is contrastingly flexible, as well as being flatter.

Chirm

There does seem to be a shared spirit between children and birds, so it’s nice to find a word that makes the connection.

Chirm (noun): a din, especially from (a) the blended singing of many birds or (b) the noise of many children chattering (OED).

Chifforobe

This item of furniture does what its etymology implies: a portmanteau of ‘chiffonier’ (a moveable low cupboard with a sideboard top) and ‘wardrobe’. I favour this image because the leafy plant atop the chifforobe looks like a candidate for making a chiffonade (finely shredded greens, often as a garnish for soup), which might indeed be what the smaller pot contains if we press further into fantasy. So that’s three consecutive words in the Oxford English Dictionary ticked off: chiffonier – chiffonade – chifforobe! It would be nice to move on to the next: 'chignon' is another nice word (for a mass of hair worm at the back of the head) but I’m not sure how to tie it in…

Chrematistic

Online searches for ‘wealth’ tend to yield images of banknotes. But does the gaining of wealth still involve the acquisition of cash? Maybe not: only 14% of payments were made that way by May 2024, when the Bank of England issued the first notes featuring Charles III. That was some 20 months after he became king, and then with new notes only introduced when the old ones – there are some 5bn in circulation - wear out. As usual since 2016, the notes are polymer plastic (longer-lasting than paper). The delay allowed for development of the notably crownless design, and nine months testing to ensure that the security features worked, and that the notes did not interfere with the operation of ATMs. £20 notes were not produced from 1943 (the Gold Standard having been abandoned) to 1973: £20 in 1943 was equivalent to £300 in 2024, so the perception that the highest value current note of £50 is a high denomination is something of an illusion. Cash is not as chrematistic as it was.

Chrematistic: of or pertaining to the creation of wealth

Circumnutation

Can plants think? Those who hold that they can are likely to cite circumnutation – the ability to wind around a central axis during growth to reach more favourable environmental conditions – as one strand of evidence. Paco Calvi, in ‘Planta Sapoiens: Unmasking plant intelligence’ (2023) suggests that the movements required are flexible and goal-directed, consistent with a – non-neural – form of consciousness.

Charles Darwin made the first detailed analysis of circumnutation in ‘The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants’ in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, 1865 – six years on from ‘On The Origin of Species’. The illustration is of squash tendrils.

Circumsolar

Where are we going this year? Around the Sun with Circumsolar Tours: the furthest travel, yet the cheapest holiday - you don't even have to book...

The Earth travels about 584m miles (940m km) per year in circling the sun. That's about 1.6m miles per day, or 66,627 mph. Circumsolar is a rather unusual unusual word, in that it's easy to work out what it means - yet I hadn't seen it used before...

Cockatrice

I should have been aware of the cockatrice, as Shakespeare’s Juliet mentions its ‘death-darting eye’ shortly after asking ‘Hath Romeo slain himself?’ It’s a two-legged dragon with a cock’s head, and the ability to kill people simply by looking at them. The best way to see off this mythical creature? Put it in front of a mirror…

Compenetration

The porn industry seems to have missed out here. Positions in which all three female orifices are occupied are rather charmlessly known as ‘airtight’, yet the word ‘compenetration’ is available: ‘to penetrate throughout’. By way of evidence, an image search for ‘multiple penetration’ yields little one could show a child, whereas the very limited results thrown up by ‘compenetration’ include only the more affecting business of intertwining hands.

Compersion

This word, originated in New York by the utopian Kerista community (1956-91) - centred on the ideals of polyfidelity - has not yet reached mainstream dictionaries. But I like the idea that English should have a term for feeling empathetic joy, rather than jealousy, when a partner enjoys interacting romantically or sexually with others. Or, more broadly, for the vicarious happiness caused by the happiness of others. The diagram situates the concept neatly.

Constation

I came across this in Henry James’ subtly satirical 1879 novella ‘Daisy Miller’, in which he gives the word to the inner monologue of Daisy’s admirer, writing of ‘the soft impartiality of her constations, as Winterbourne would have termed them’. They are certified statements or findings, Daisy being unconventionally free for the time in putting hers forward. None of which, really, explains why an online search for the word’s image throws up this endearing cartoon of a man unpicking a knotty problem, perhaps in his own thread-brain. Though one can say that Winterbourne failed to unpick the knotty problems of exactly what he thought of Daisy and how he should act towards her, before her untimely demise…

Constuprate

This is an old – perhaps obsolete – word meaning to rape or ravage. I’m not surprised it’s fallen out of use – it sounds too civilised, scientific almost, for the act. Google’s top image suggestions all come from the online Collins dictionary, which illustrates most words straightforwardly, but defaults here to domestic equipment and furnishings. Rather odd, unless one takes it to be a reference to the fact that the majority of rapes (55% per 2021 data) occur in or close to the victim’s home – and 80% of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. It’s likely to be a distressingly domestic matter.

Saying that 'constuprate' sounds a less violent word that 'rape or 'ravage' might sound a stretch: are there really connections between word structure and meaning? Well, such sound symbolism can occur, as demonstrated across several languages. In English people have been shown, by asking them to label diagrams, to associate the sounds in the non-word 'maluma' with round shapes and the sounds in the non-word 'takete' with spiky shapes.

Contronym

Nice concept, disappointing word? A contronym is a word that can have opposite meanings, depending on the context. English has surprisingly many. It’s a little disappointing, though, that ‘contronym’ itself has only one meaning. And you don’t get much out of a visual search, just lists of words. I’ve chosen one that does at least have pictures. As for the best contronyms, I favour ‘pit’, a hard seed or a gaping hole; ‘cleave’, to split apart, or to stick together; ‘annual’, recurring every year (as in a festival) or lasting just one year (as in a plant); and ‘clip’ – to fasten or cut off. They’re satisfyingly clear in the opposition of the dual meanings.

Costrel

A flat, usually earthenware, container for liquids with loops through which a belt or cord may be passed for easy carrying.

This attractively buttery mammiform example is from the Salisbury Museum: I came across the word there, rather than via a dictionary flick-through. It was found in 1953 but is undated: being from the local Verwood Pottery makes it likely to be 19th century.

Cremello / Perlino

Perlinos and cremellos are often considered the most beautiful of horses. Some horses have a ‘cream gene’ in addition to their base coat colour. That causes colour variations, influenced by whether they have one or two copies of the cream gene. That leads to the following classification of horses with lightened coats:

Base coat Single cream Double cream

Chestnut Palomino Cremello

Bay Buckskin Perlino

Black Smoky black Smoky cream

Those double creams can look similar, so DNA testing is the only way to be sure what you have. In general, though, perlinos have a cream-colored body but a mane and tail that may be somewhat more reddish in colour than a cremello’s. To put that classification into pictures:

My wife's New Forest pony, incidentally, is a grey - which is what you call a white horse, also with some potential for confusion. If you want to get technical about the genetics, just as incidentally, the key to single vs double cream is Zygosity, the degree to which both copies of a chromosome or gene have the same genetic sequence. Single is heterozygous, having one copy of the cream gene; double is homozygous, having two copies of the cream gene.

Croodle / Groodle

‘Croodle’ is a nice word I came upon at the start of Anthony Mortimer’s translation of Ronsard’s most famous poem:

When you are old, croodled beside the fire,

Spinning by candlelight, you’ll sing, and say,

Still marvelling, ‘Ronsard wrote that for me

Back in the days when I was young and fair’.

'Croodle', then: to huddle together. Compare cuddle, snuggle, canoodle. But an image search for ‘croodle’ comes up – mostly – with dogs, namely the hybrid, popularised in the 1990’s, of Golden Retriever and Poodle. That’s known as a ‘Golden Doodle’ in the US and Britain and a ‘Groodle’ in Australia. Evidently Google takes 'croodle' to be a maltyped attempt to find a Groodle. Because the Groodle has two very different parent breeds, it seems, ‘traits like size, weight, and coat type are not as predictable as with purebred dogs'. That said, well-bred Groodles tend to be smart, happy, friendly dogs who are eager to please and quick to learn.’ So the chosen image is, I’d say, a Groodle croodle.

Pierre de Ronsard ‘Sonnets Pour Helene Book II: XLIII’, 1578

Culm

Does the availability of a word affect what you look at? I think it can. I don't recall ever taking much notice of the jointed stems of grasses and sedges, but now that I know that such a stem is one of the meanings of ‘culm’…

The photograph is of the jointed goatgrass (Aegilops cylindrica), which must be the essence of culm.

Customiable

It might be just a missing 's' slip, but when I saw 'customiable', my new word antennae were alerted. However, I can find no evidence that it exists. The word's chances of entering the lexicon are probably slim: 'customisable' and 'bespoke' cover the territory adequately. Besides, if it does become a word, it will lose what I like about it: that it could be the result of treating 'customisable' as customisable...

Not an Internet search image in this case, but my snap from an escalator passing over the Yi Fang drinks counter in Bond Street underground’s shopping centre, 2022 (the counter was removed in 2023).

Daut

Not a daughter, familiarly and economically addressed, but a Scots-derived term for petting. So you might well daut your daut, if we can so abbreviate 'daughter'...

The image came with the indication that each year since 2008 the third Monday of July is ‘Global Hug Your Kids Day’… Daut On!

Demijohn

You can buy demijohns, like most things, on Amazon: they’re glass containers. But I came across the word first in one of Emily Dickinson’s more surprising poems, No. 159 in the collected edition of 1,775:

A little bread – a crust – a crumb –

A little trust – a demijohn –

Can keep the soul alive –

That made me think a demijohn was a pretty small measure of something. Maybe the meaning has shifted since 1860, but according to Wikipedia ‘a demijohn, also known as a carboy, is a rigid container with a typical capacity of 4 to 60 litres. They are primarily used for transporting liquids, often water or chemicals. They are also used for in-home fermentation of beverages, often beer or wine.’ So that’s quite a lot of trust in the poem…

That, though, isn’t the surprising part of Poem 159. That’s the apparent directness of the conclusion:

A sailor's business is the shore!

A soldier's - balls! Who asketh more,

Must seek the neighboring life!

Demulcent

What’s the most soothing word - 'lenitive', 'softening', 'emollient', 'relaxing', 'soothing' itself? – to describe the sensation of being soothed? I rather like ‘demulcent’. Medically, a demulcent is an agent that forms a soothing, protective film when administered onto a mucous membrane surface, including gums. Various herbs are thought to have relevantly similar properties.

Dermatoglyphics

‘Dermatoglyphics’ is a rare word, but given that ‘dermatology’ is fairly common, it isn’t so hard to work out that it refers to study of the skin. The longer word, though – unlike its double-o family member – is an isogram. That is to say, it uses all of its constituent letters once only. At fifteen letters, it is the longest such word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Shorter examples are, of course, rife. And I thank you for reading about 'dermatoglyphics' by means of this extra musing – a pure one, as each word is an isogram.

More specifically, dermatoglyphics is the scientific study of the epidermal ridges and patterns on the fingers, palms, and soles of the feet and toes. These unique, permanent patterns are formed before birth and are influenced by genetic factors and pre-natal development, making dermatoglyphics useful in studying genetic abnormalities, congenital conditions, and neurodevelopmental disruptions. The arch, loop and whorl are the commonest categories in fingerprints.Dermatoglyphic patterns on the fingers often differ in syndromes and other conditions with a developmental component, compared to the general population.

Detent

Such a simple combination of common letters was bound to be a word, I thought, but had I seen it before? I was looking at Julia Phillips’ sculpture ‘Attachment I with Ball Detent’, in the Barbican’s Curve Gallery. And indeed, a detent is a catch in a machine which prevents motion until released (including in a clock, where it regulates striking). Ball detent pins, also known as quick-release pins, are used in applications that require rapid, frequent, and manual assembly and disassembly of a specific product or object. Ball detent pins feature one or two spring-loaded balls actuated by a pulling force. There are plenty of other types of detent pin – pull ring, clevis, spring plunger, threaded – but I guess they need not concern us here…

The illustrations show Julia Phillips: ‘Attachment I with Ball Detent’, 2023 - Hand-patinated bronze and stainless steel, 119 x 25 x 12 cm, 1 of 8 unique versions. According to the exhibition guide, ‘Phillips incorporates industrial hardware into her sculptures to ‘suggest the possibility of movement or reconfiguration among elements. They also resonate metaphorically by evoking, for instance, the relative strength or tenuousness of human bonds and attachments.’

Diastema

Diastema is a gap between your teeth. This can happen between any of your teeth, but is most noticeable when the gap is between your upper front teeth. That ‘midline diastema’ is a frequent part of the normal development of children’s teeth - at 6-8 about half of children have such a gap. While it normally closes with time, some 5% of adults retain the gap, typically inheriting the look. Whether a diastema is attractive, or should be closed for cosmetic reasons, is a matter of taste - but I would suggest that 5% makes it common enough to be ‘normal’ but rare enough to be ‘distinctive’, which sound a statistically good place to be.

That is my own midline diastema: my father had it, my children have it too…

Dilatant / Pseudoplastic / Rheopectic / Thixotropic

So far as changes in viscosity goes, there are a rather extravagant five types of fluid, distinguished by how they react to the ‘shear stress’ applied by, for example, shaking them. Plenty are Newtonian: viscosity remains constant whatever agitation is applied – water, for example, or alcohol. On the other hand, you have:

Dilatant: viscosity increases immediately when shear stress is applied, then the fluid returns to the original state immediately when that stops. Quicksand and putty are examples.
Pseudoplastic: viscosity decreases immediately when shear stress is applied, then the fluid returns to the original state immediately when that stops. Ketchup, blood.
Rheopectic: viscosity increases over time when shear stress is applied, then the fluid returns over time to its original state if that stops. Printer inks, cream.
Thixotropic: viscosity decreases over time when shear stress is applied, then the fluid returns over time to its original state if that stops. Cosmetic, paints.

Nice that tomato ketchup and real blood share pseudoplasticity, as if to assist the theatrical conviction of substitution. And this strikes me as fertile territory for analogies. A top sports player, for example, will be thixotropic: the more stress is applied, the more fluently they will respond, rising to the biggest moments – whereas weaker players will seize up under pressure and play worse. Effectively, they are rheopectic.

In 2021 Heinz launched Tomato Blood Ketchup as a Halloween special

Dodkin

How do you measure a dodkin – that is, any coin of small value? Real terms is surely advisable, and it turns out that the decimal penny is now the lowest value coin in British history: even though you get 100 to the £ as against 1,920 half-farthings (1842-69), 960 farthings (1707-1960) or 200 decimal halfpennies (1971-84). All were dodkins in their day, but the half-farthing, for example, never dipped below a value equivalent to 5p in current money. The BBC graphic takes the story to 2018, since when the 1p has depreciated further…

Dowsets

I found this word in Gordon Williams’ impressively thorough 352-page online source ‘Shakespeare’s sexual language – a glossary’ . A words search revealed 145 references to ‘vagina’ and 145 to ‘penis’, but a more manageable 15 to testicles, x of which led to different terms used by Shakespeare: balls, bullets, cullions, damsons, ducats, stones… and dowsets. That last are the most specific: deer’s testicles. X attributes this to Shakespeare via Thierry and Theodoret, seen as a collaborative work, primarily by John Fletcher, so perhaps that’s not the strongest attribution. But the quote is 'May the stag thou hunt'st stand long... And the ladies eat his dowsets’, suggesting that they are a delicacy. And indeed, the ancient Greeks, believed that eating raw testicles boosted testosterone levels, strength and libido, and fry-ups from arena-killed or farm-castrated bulls were apparently a popular dish in pre-modern Spain and the American Wild West respectively. Fast forward, and Serbs seem the keenest, even holding an annual World Testicle Cooking Championship in Lipovica. The image, then, is of whitetail deer’s testicles ready to be prepared. Enough to make many squeamish, I dare say, and I’m not too upset that - as I don’t eat mammals - I’m out of the way of that temptation.

Earthite

A rather attractive and potentially useful term for us Earth-dwellers, first used over 200 years ago by the Irish poet and satirist Eaton Barrett (1786–1820), but yet to catch on much - the oddly diminutive ‘earthling’ is heard more often.

The illustration is of Yinka Shonibare MBE’s ‘The Townley Venus’, 2017, typical of the Anglo-Nigerian artist’s work in wrapping a figure in patterns associated with African fabrics and replacing its head with a globe to indicate a whole world rather than Eurocentric approach. Perhaps there’s something there of how an earthite, rather than a citizen of any particular nation, ought to look.

Ecchymosis

This is not such a cool look as it may appear… This is a patient with circular ecchymotic patches on his back. A bruise is skin discoloration caused by a blow, impact, or suction. Ecchymosis can appear similar, but it is caused by bleeding underneath the skin, in this case following a car accident: such leaking of blood from blood vessels into the subcutaneous tissue that underlies the skin is most commonly caused by blunt force trauma leading to the rupture of capillaries.

Echor

‘Echor’ means ‘encircling mountains’, a setting deserving of its own word. Whether it can count as an English usage is debatable, however. It was originally – maybe only – available in Sindarin, the language of the Sindar, the Elves of Teleri lineage who chose to stay behind during the Great Journey to Aman before the First Age – all as imagined in Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’.

If we allow the word, then the image shows what may be Europe’s finest echor-location. Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, is on a lake surrounded by nine mountains (though it’s known as 'the city between the seven mountains', channelling the good fortune associated with seven as a number, but leaving it unclear which are the seven mountains in question).

Endoparasite

An endoparasite lives, as tapeworms most famously do, inside its host. The most bizarre is probably the tongue-eating louse, Cymothoa exigua, from the woodlouse family, the isopods. It enters a fish’s mouth through its gills, then uses tiny claws to sever the blood vessels of its tongue, causing it to atrophy so that only a stub remains. The louse attaches its fourteen legs to the base, and takes over: it’s a similar size, and can do the work required, as fish tongues are not muscular, and have the fairly limited role of fixing food in place. The louse feeds on its host’s blood and mucus, weakening it somewhat, but not enough to stop it living a normal life with a replacement tongue.

The tongue-eating louse is the only known organ-replacing endopararsite - from the Latin ‘endo’, within, as opposed to ectoparasites from ‘ecto’, without. Cymothoa exigua reproduces sexually inside its hosts, and is also unusual in being a protoandrous hermaphrodite: tongue-eating lice start life as males, but transform into females once they reach about 1 cm in length. Protandry (there’s another word!) is where male maturity precedes female, the most widespread example being how the male reproductive organs (stamens) of a flower mature before the female ones (carpels), thereby ensuring that self-fertilization does not occur.

Entheogen

Entheogen is a fairly recent neologism, coined in 1979 from the Ancient Greek, éntheos – ‘full of the god, inspired, possessed’ - and genésthai – ‘to come into being’. Thus, entheogens are psychoactive substances that induce alterations in perception such that one experiences feelings of inspiration, often in a religious or spiritual context. The word was invented on the grounds that ‘hallucinogen’ was inappropriate owing to its etymological relationship to words relating to delirium and insanity, and ‘psychedelic’ was too strongly associated with 1960s pop culture. Carl A. P. Ruck, an academic involved in the word’s invention, stated in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs that ‘in a strict sense, only those vision-producing drugs that can be shown to have figured in shamanic or religious rites would be designated entheogens, but in a looser sense, the term could also be applied to other drugs, both natural and artificial, that induce alterations of consciousness similar to those documented for ritual ingestion of traditional entheogens.’

I came across the word as the title for Louise Giovanelli’s painting ‘Entheogen’, 2023, which naturally enough makes a good illustration of the term. Is the painting enough to transport the viewer shown, one wonders...?

Entomophagy

There are good reasons for entomophagy – the eating of insects: they’re a rich source of protein and amino acids, use a fraction of the resources of meat production, with fewer greenhouse gases to boot, and might be seen as more ethically appropriate than the factory farming of birds and mammals. Most animals think nothing of the matter. It’s only a matter of time…

Epistrophe

Where anaphora is the rhetorical device of repeating words for effect at the beginning of a sentence or clause, epistrophe is such repetition at later in the sentence. Thus ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…’ (Charles Dickens: Tale of Two Cities’) as opposed to ‘Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning Death / Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning Death / Those who sit in the stye of contentment, meaning Death…’ (T.S. Eliot: ‘Marina’). ‘Epistrophe’ is the more interesting word, being derived from the Ancient Greek for ‘turning back’, and being adopted by Plato to stand for the need to turn back from the false and empty values of the outer world towards the enlightenment provided by the inner self.

And the image? Those are the male (left) and female (right) of Epistrophe grossulariae, a brightly banded hoverfly which is one of the one of the world’s 6,000+ known species – there are so many full studies waiting to be made!

Evert

One of the commoner words I found I didn’t know has been hiding in plain sight for many years as the name of tennis star Chris Evert: its several meanings include to turn a structure outwards. Something often turned the wrong way out is the toilet roll (in case you’re in any doubt, the patent drawing submitted by Seth Wheeler of Albany, New York from 1891 shows the correct alignment). All of which leaves just one matter for investigation: does Evert evert her rolls?

‘Evert’ is one of several mostly more familiar words incorporating the suffix ‘vert’, from the Latin root meaning ‘turn’: ‘avert’, ‘divert, ‘invert’, ‘pervert’, ‘retrovert’, ‘revert’ etc. The handy ‘evert’ can mean cast from power / frustrate / defeat / turn aside / turn outwards or inside-out. Chris Evert reached a record 34 Grand Slam singles finals during 1974-66, the winning 18 of them. She was one of three players – with Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors – who might be cited as the popularisers of the now ubiquitous double-handed backhand. Evert, then, whatever she does with her loo rolls, everted the norm for the backhand, and was everted in a grand slam final more often than any other player. Connors and Evert were, incidentally, briefly engaged, and she's gone on to marry a range of sportsmen: English tennis player John Lloyd (1979-87), American downhill skier Andy Mill (1988-2006) and Australian golfer Greg Norman (2008-09). That left time, surely, to add to the list. A footballer would have made sense in terms of sports coverage, and/or a Frenchman, in order to achieve a career grand slam of tennis locations. Thierry Henry would be ideal, but as of 2025 she hadn't re-re-re-remarried.

Fascine

A fascine is a bundle of sticks bound together. I’ve seen medieval peasants carrying them in paintings, but hadn’t logged the word. This, though, is a giant version carried on a tank. The idea was developed in World War I: the tank would drop the fascine into a trench, enabling it - and following infantry - to roll across and so make progress. The image is of a World War II tank equipped to use the technique.

I didn’t expect taking my grandson to the Tank Museum to lead to new word discovery…

Fizzgiggious / Flamdoodle

Balderdash, gibberish, claptrap, blether, hogwash, baloney, guff, eyewash, piffle, gobbledygook, hooey, tripe, drivel, poppycock, bollocks, bilge, bull, bunk…

I like the odd word for nonsense, but flamdoodle may be my favourite. That’s in the dictionary, but ‘fizzgiggious’ isn’t, being a nonsense word rather than a word for nonsense. It comes from Edward Lear’s ‘Twenty-Six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures’, first published in 1872:

The fizzgiggious Fish,
who always walked about upon Stilts,
because he had no legs.

Perhaps ‘confounding’ would make sense as a synonym for ‘fizzgiggious’. Perhaps ‘fizz’ would make sense as a synonym for ‘nonsense’. Perhaps it already is one.

Floordrobe

At the margins of mainstream dictionaries is this light-hearted word for the minimum effort teen-favoured storage solution for clothes: simply drop them on the floor. The danger, I suppose, is that the labour of finding the right item swells in response, and there is no net saving of time. Moreover, I have come across the simultaneous presence of wardrobe and floordrobe: certainly, something must have gone wrong there. And yet, while the default expectation must be for disorganisation, the well-managed floordrobe may, as shown, have some easy-view merit, though there is the matter of hoovering to take into account…

Foggage

Can cows eat fog? Apparently so, fog being the term for long grass and other plants left standing in a pasture for winter grazing.

The less familiar word ‘Foggage’ is defined as ‘the right to pasture cattle on fog’. As a winter feeding system, foggage is becoming recognised as having environmental benefits compared with using silage.

Fucoid

Seaweed is on the up as a food, though it remains rare as clothing outside of the mermaid community. The main point to make about the 12,000 known species is that, despite relying on photosynthesis, they are algae not plants. Consequently, they have no leaves, stems, or roots to transport water or nutrients: rather, each cell develops what it needs directly from the seawater around it. Nutrition aside, algae – covering plankton as well – produces a majority of the world’s oxygen supplies. What, the fucoid? Yes, we should be grateful...

Fucoid – having the qualities of seaweed

Gabion

If dumbbells aren’t quite enough for you, allow me to recommend a gabion basket. Perhaps you could fill one with dumbbells, though I can find no photographic evidence that anyone has done that yet.

A gabion (from Italian gabbione, ‘big cage’) is a cage, cylinder or box filled with rocks, concrete, rubble or sometimes sand and soil for use in civil engineering, road building, landscaping and military applications. I rather like, in passing, the American term for rubble: ‘riprap’.

Gaof

In mining, a ‘goaf’ is the space left behind in a mine after mineral extraction, or the loose debris left in those old workings. The detection and correct handling of goafs is a complex matter, and the diagram comes from a paper considering how best to tackle them. The painting is what introduced me to the word: ‘Goaf Works I’, 2024, by Francesca Simon, whose work infects geometric abstraction with echoes of the landscape and the manmade additions to it – largely inspired her daily walks on the North Yorkshire Moors.

Gelastic

Some words carry baggage… It seems logical to have a word to mean ‘provoking or pertaining to laughter’, but none of the derivatives of ‘laugh’ itself quite seem to fit: ‘laughsome’ is close, but archaic. ‘Comedic’ will work in some contexts, but really refers to what is likely to cause laughter, rather than directly to the laughter itself. ‘Risible’ can mean ‘associated with laughter’, hence the ‘risible muscles’ in the mouth – but it is mainly used with negative connotations equivalent to ‘ludicrous’ or ‘laughable’, and that gets in the way. All in all, then, ‘gelastic’ could be a handy word. The problem is that it seems to be used primarily in the context of a ‘gelastic seizure’, causing uncontrolled laughing or giggling even in the absence of joy or happiness. Hardly a laughing matter, the more so as the main underlying adult causes are a tumour near the hypothalamus or a lesion in the frontal or parietal lobes. In children it’s more likely to be due to over-secretion of gonadotropin-releasing and luteinizing hormones, often associated with growth problems and emotional issues.

Gimp

This neat little word has acquired three meanings. First, an ornamental material for trimming dresses (17th century onwards). Second, a crippled leg, or person so handicapped, perhaps combining ‘limp’ with ‘gammy’ (1920’s onwards). Third, as in a ‘gimp suit’, which covers the body completely (1970’s gay underground scene onwards). But you can’t make a gimp suit out of gimp - PVC, latex, rubber and spandex are the preferred materials, being stretchy enough to fit tightly. So that more recent use probably derives from the way such suits handicapped the user (alongside other restraints) for purposes of sexual domination. That usage reached a mainstream of sorts via the inclusion of ‘The Gimp’ as a leather-encased character in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’ (1994). That may, in turn, have echoed the nickname of Martin Snyder (1893–1981), a Jewish-American gangster commonly known as ‘Moe the Gimp’.

The image shows ‘The Gimp Man of Essex’, an anonymous resident of Colchester who has become well-known locally over the past decade for wandering about in a latex gimp suit. Interviewed by The Independent in 2022, he explained that ‘The Essex Gimp is my alter ego; my downtime; my chance to be someone else for a short bit of time… People might think of it as weird, but I’m not doing any harm. I’m not going out naked. I’m fully covered, no matter what other people’s perception of those clothes are.’

Glabella

It makes sense that, the more you worry about the lines between and over your eyes, the more likely they are to be prominent. That makes the glabella the site of the rather poignant injustice that those who care least about a problem are the least likely to be afflicted by it, at least insofar as ageing is their worry.

Glabella — the flat area of bone between the eyebrows - a term I can find used only in the cosmetic surgery industry.

Griffonage

There’s a distinction to me made between griffonage – illegible handwriting in the manner of the classic doctor’s prescription – and asemic writing, which takes on the form of writing but never sets out to have any semantic content. The way to treat the former, I suggest, is to treat it as the latter: relax into its aesthetic properties and pragmatic effects without allowing the lack of meaning to become a frustration.

Guisarme

This turns out to be just one of many attractively-named medieval weapons based on the principle of fixing something heavy or sharp to the end of a pole, the better to apply enough force from a reasonably safe distance to trouble an armoured foe on horseback – something you couldn’t do with a straightforward sword or axe. Telling polearms one from another is a somewhat specialist task, but maybe there’s potential to play all these shapes into a cutting edge design of wallpaper or clothing…

No less a source than The Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition Player’s Handbook (Revised) defines seven main classes of weapon, which I summarise as follows:

Bardiche: an elongated battle axe.

Bec de corbin: has a pick or beak is to punch through plate, a hammer side and a short blade to finish things off.

Fauchard: a long, inward curving blade mounted on a shaft

Glaive: simply a single-edged blade mounted on a shaft.

Guisarme: an elaborately curved heavy blade, probably originating from peasants putting a pruning hook onto a spear shaft.

Glaive-guisarme: adds a hook to the back of the glaive’s blade.

Halberd: a combination weapon of large, angled axe blade tapering to a long spear point or awl pike, with a hook on the back for attacking armor or dismounting riders.

Guling

If a bolster is a narrow pillow or cushion designed for back or arm support, if not purely decorative, then the Southeast Asian equivalent is more definite in shape and more specific to sleep. Hence the terms gối ôm (Vietnamese: 'hugging pillow') monkang (Thai: 'side pillow') and guling (Indonesian: 'roll pillow') as well as such nicknames as ‘hotdog pillow’, for the sausage shape, and ‘Dutch wife’, for the companionable aspect – a term which has also been used for a sex doll…

Gyrus / Sulcus

The brain’s outer surface is full of folds and grooves that give it a wrinkled appearance. These folds aren’t random. They’re made up of gyri (ridges) and sulci (grooves), and they play a crucial role in how our brains are organized and function. This pattern of folds increases the brain’s surface area, packing in more neurons without increasing the brain’s size. The more surface area, the greater the brain’s ability to process complex information. And the folding of the brain allows a large cortex to fit into the limited space of the skull. This is vital for higher-level functions like reasoning, memory, and language. Understanding the structures of the gyri and sulci helps map out different brain regions and link them to specific functions like movement, memory, and language. That’s a whole complex subject into which one could dive, but I actually came across the word ‘sulcus’ metaphorically. Georgina Starr’s bizarrely compelling book ‘The Discreet Dash’ describes its lead character leaning back on the ‘soft sulcus of her bed’. That doesn’t sound to me quite how a bed is likely to look, but let’s pass that by, too.

The images are of the brain, a giant silk moth, and the first time I came across the writing in ‘The Discreet Dash’ - through a staged performance of the work in progress at the Frieze art fair in 2017. Silk moths play a large part in the novel, in particular an invented species – I believe – from the family Saturniidae, which contains the giant silk moths. Starr’s ‘Oraxxia Saturniid’ seems to merge a moth with a spider character from the gaming world. It is also, or was thought to be, extinct. Anyway, it turns out that ingesting the eggs can provide hallucinogenic experiences triggering inter-species communication. There are, incidentally, far more moths than you might suppose in the silk moth family: more than 12,000 in the Bombycoidea superfamily of Lepidoptera, of which 2,300 are in the Saturniidae. So maybe Oraxxia really is one of them, but hard to track down. As for the giant silk moths themselves, they are notable for having no tongue and no digestive tract: the adults cannot eat, they just mate and then die within a few days once their energy runs out. No existentialist agonising over purpose for them! Is that enough of my most obscurely convoluted set of word connections?

Hackling

Hackles are raised often enough – normally metaphorically, rather than by literal reference to the hairs or feathers that erect along an animal’s back when it is angry or alarmed. But what is ‘hackling’? That brings us into the vocabulary of flax. The fibres you need for making linen are located between the skin and the inner woody core – the shive - of the flax stems. Hackling is the act of combing flax with a hackle, of taking unretted flax, freshly broken and scutched, and turning it into fine fibre ready to spin. You toss the ends of the flax onto the hackle and draw it through.

The illustrations are of a rooster with its hackles up - can that be termed 'hackling'? - and of the act of hackling flax.

Hexapla

What is the hexaplanation for this? A hexapla is a sixfold text in parallel columns, most often used to show alternate translations of the bible. These columns are in the Francis Quadrangle at the University of Missouri in Columbia – they are the only remaining part of an Academic Hall that burned down in 1892. So the hexapla nation in question is the United States.

Hiaqua

What can I buy with this? Something, surely? It’s a hiaqua - a necklace of large dentalium shells, formerly used as money by natives of the North Pacific coasts of America.

In this late 19th century necklace, columns of dentalium shells alternate with colourful beads and buffalo hide spacers. Dentalium is a large genus of tooth shells or tusk shells, marine scaphopod molluscs in the family Dentaliidae. Peoples of the Northwest Pacific Coast would trade dentalium into the Great Plains, Great Basin, Central Canada, Northern Plateau and Alaska for other items including many foods, decorative materials, dyes, hides, macaw feathers from Central America, and turquoise from the American Southwest.

Holloway

The name ‘Holloway’ is fairly common: the 501st most frequent in the UK, with 13,000 bearing it currently (for context: Smith = 550,000, Jones = 425,000) and I’d always assumed that the well-known Holloway Road in Islington was named after a local dignitary. In fact, it’s the other way around: a ‘holloway’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon ‘hola weg’, meaning sunken road (or ‘hollow way’), its profile lowered by perpetual passage - erosion by human feet, horses, cartwheels and cattle driven alongside, combined with water then flowing through. Holloway Road, now thoroughly tamed, was once the main drovers’ route from the north to Smithfield market. The name originates from those living near such timeworn tracks.

The images are of Holloway Road, London; and of a holloway in Brittany (where it would be ‘un creux’) as photographed by Jean-Francois Gornet.

Humectation

I admit it: I’m in the recalcitrant 65% of men over-60 who don’t use a facial moisturising product, as opposed to the 65% of men in their 20’s and 30’s who do. The trend is clear, and I guess women are pushing towards 100%. What am I missing out on? Humectation would:

· - Help keep my skin hydrated and refreshed

· - Put less pressure on my glands to keep my skin healthy

· - Improve my skin’s chemical balance, reducing the chances of redness or acne

· - Give my face a firmer look, reducing the appearance of wrinkles.

All this for an investment of two minutes a day. Maybe I’ll persuade myself yet…

Humectation - the action of moistening / condition of being moist

Hyperaemic

The only way is up... At the more erudite margins of the adult film genre – a friend was telling me – those due to receive don’t gasp excitedly ‘You’re so hard!’ but ‘You’re hyperaemic! Your corpora cavernosa must be unusually full!’

Hyperaemia: the presence of more than the normal amount of blood in a part of the body. Corpora cavernosa: the two masses of erectile tissue forming the bulk of the penis (and the clitoris)

Hysteron proteron

This seems to come only as a two-word component: the hysteron proteron (from the Greek: ὕστερον πρότερον, hýsteron próteron, ‘later earlier’) is a rhetorical device, a form of hyperbaton, which describes general rearrangements of the sentence. It occurs when the first key word of the idea refers to something that happens temporally later than the second key word, the idea being to call attention to the more important idea by placing it first. ‘I’ll murder you, then demand an apology’. An example of hysteron proteron encountered in everyday life is the common reference to putting on one's ‘shoes and socks’, rather than ‘socks and shoes’.

A potentially handy device of which to be aware. I arrived at the word by a maximimally obscure route, hence the image. It’s the shop sign for ‘Project Orange’ at Clapham Junction, London. What, I wondered, did the accidentally-formed word ‘Proetorne’ mean? Nothing that I could find - the closest I could get was ‘Proteron’. This image is also unique in being included in both 'Matters of Words' and my 'New Enquiries' photopoems (for 2024).

Hypoxic

I’d be worried if sleeping at the bottom of a pile of walruses, not just that I might be squashed – an adult male can weigh up to two tonnes, which is certainly a load of bull – but also that I could have problems breathing. At least I’d be out in the open: conditions at the bottom of a not unusual pile of fifty mole-rats could get even more hypoxic, deep in the burrow. I’m not sure there’s a word for it (‘univelocital’?), but walruses can swim and run – on all fours with their flippers – at about the same speed of 10km per hour. That, surprisingly, is equivalent to an average human’s fast running speed. Less surprisingly, it’s quicker than we can swim: 3 km per hour being typical.

Hypoxic: having too little oxygen

Innascibility

God is the exemplar of innascibility - and, one could argue, the only such being. But one can look at the term more broadly. It is often said that entrepreneurs / geniuses / criminals / champions etc (insert to taste) are not born but made. George Bernard Shaw even claimed that ‘Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination’, though if there’s any role in life for which birth seems pivotal, it’s that of monarch. Moreover, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’, according to Simone de Beauvoir. She may not have had physical transitioning between sexes in mind, but there’s that too…

Innascibility: the attribute of being independent of birth. Image from a website tracking ‘before’ and ‘after’ male to female transitions.

Intercalation

Intercalation in timekeeping is the insertion of a leap day, week, or month into some calendar years to make the calendar follow the seasons or moon phases. So can you explain in full the rule currently used to make up for the solar year having 365.24 days, rather than the 365 whole days required by a calendar year? Yes, under the Gregorian calendar - adopted by Britain in 175 CE - this is adjusted for by adding a leap day (or ‘intercalary day’) every four years. But 1900 wasn’t a leap year, and nor will 2100 be. Why so? Years divisible by 100 but not by 400 are exempted in order to improve accuracy. Thus, only one in four ‘century years’ are leap years, 2000 being somewhat unusual in that it was one. I guess if it hadn't been, I'd already have been aware of that intercalatory detail.

Irreption

One of my favourite art films is Navid Nuur’s 'When Doubt Turns into Destiny' (1993 - 2011), a cat and mouse surveillance video in which the artist attempts to evade the security lights installed in Berlin’s alleyways and courtyards by moving extremely cautiously, as if performing a slow-motion version of himself. When he fails – and the lights do ‘discover’ him – he freezes his position. It’s funny, but not altogether fool – as that ingeniously illustrates his position as an artist: he continuously finds himself moving between two states, a before-and-after, a cause-and-effect, a dark and light. It is he who is causing a change, a rupture, a sudden shift in the order of things, by trying to be slower than the light, in order to be faster - smarter - than it. Ten years after encountering that film, I’ve (finally!) come across the perfect description for what Nuur was doing: attempting irreption. Irreption is the act of creeping in, of entering by stealth or avoidance. And yes, it would make a good theme for a show - with Nuur at its centre, of course.

Irrreption (from the Latin repere, creep in) is I suppose a kind of anti-eruption (from the Latin rupere, burst forth). The image is a still from the 31 minutes of 'When Doubt Turns into Destiny'.

Jacinthe

‘What colour is that hyacinth?’ If it’s ‘a moderate orange that is yellower and stronger than honeydew’, then according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary it is ‘jacinthe’. Given that ‘orange’ is a word with notoriously few rhymes, that could be a boon to formal poets, though I can’t recall them using it. Anyway, orange hyacinths are unusual, so here’s the alliterative alternative of ‘Janet’s Jacinthe Jewel-Tomato’, awaiting the right versifier of vegetable fruits to put it on a plinth.

Confusion at the margins… If it’s a French name, then ‘Jacinthe’ is pronounced ‘Ja-sant’, rather undermining the hyacinth link. And ‘jacinth’ is a precious stone, typically the violet blue most typical of hyacinths, and actually used in the C19th as an alternative name for the flower…

Jaup

When Jackson Pollock worked primarily in brown, which wasn’t so often, the word ‘jaup’ might suit: ‘a splash or spatter, especially of dirty water’. It’s a word used mostly in Scotland, but then Pollock’s father LeRoy Pollock - born McCoy – did have Scottish-Irish lineage.

This is Pollock’s ‘Number 13A: Arabesque’, 1948

Jill

‘Faith’, ‘Frank’ and ‘Fern’ are effing obvious enough, but one of the more obscure cases in which a common name also has a meaning is 'Jill'. ‘To jill’ is to move a boat idly around. Online jilling led me to this Baltic screenshot from a site displaying current marine traffic based on AIS (Automated Information System) data. The symbol colours indicates ship types, e.g. passenger vessels are blue, cargo vessels green, tankers red. They’re probably not jilling, but those that are could be represented similarly.

Kakistocracy

Kakistocracy, from the Greek words, ‘kakistos’ (worst) and ‘kratos’ (rule) is government by the worst people. Perhaps TIME magazine was commenting on its ubiquity and common characteristics when producing this 2018 cover image of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin merging into each other.

Kenspeckle

Who’s the most famous person in the history of the world? Almost certainly Jesus, and his image - known through many paintings - is kenspeckle to match. Oddly, though, there is little evidence of what he really looked like. If Jesus were to return, it’s perfectly possible that he wouldn’t be widely recognised, wouldn't prove kenspeckle at all.

Kenspeckle (adjective): easily recognisable; conspicuous. The illustrations are first, the classic western art representation of Jesus, in this case from a copy of da Vinci's The Last Supper attributed to Giapietrino and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio in 1515-20. And, second, a computerised reconstruction of Jesus's likely appearance as informed by British forensic experts and Israeli archaeologists' analysis of evidence including Semite skulls.

Kerning

The modification of the spaces between characters. Sometimes you need to take care, e.g. not to turn ‘Therapist’ into ‘The rapist’ by wide spacing. The substantial identifying word for the headquarters of UNISON on Euston Road, London, is more of a missed opportunity. Here was a chance for a Tory to re-orient it through physical movement into a less united 'UN IS ON' or some such cunning kerning.

Knoppers

I recently came across the word ‘knoppers’ twice – and I didn’t know it either time!

First up a knopper is an oak gall, as I learned in the context of a black ink made from knoppers having had a long art history. Those galls are distortions to acorns, caused by the tiny (2-3mm) gall wasp Andricus quercuscalicis, which lays its eggs in the developing acorns of oak trees. The gall looks like a crumpled or ridged cap on the acorn, prevents the acorn from maturing properly. That impacts on the supply of acorns for wildlife consumption, but that impact is not severe, and it doesn’t threaten the health of the trees involved (the gall wasp has a complex life cycle involving two species: one generation develops on pedunculate oak acorns, while the alternate generation develops on the catkins of Turkey oaks.

The English word ‘knopper’ derives from the German 'Knoppe', meaning ‘a knob’ or ‘a swelling’. That relates to my second encounter, in a supermarket. 'Knoppers’ is a confectionary snack, launched in Germany in 1983 by August Storck, and now becoming popular in the UK. It consists of crisp baked wafers, creamy milk filling, hazelnut crème, and crunchy roasted hazelnut pieces. It isn’t especially knob-like, so the thinking behind the brand name remains opaque.

I guess that leaves just two questions. Can you eat oak galls? I wouldn’t advise it, as their high tannic acid content makes them taste very bitter and astringent, potentially causing mild stomach upset or constipation, and they contain insect larvae. Even if you are a tannin-resistant acorn-guzzling pig, those knoppers are best avoided. And can you make a worthwhile ink out of the confectionary snack? It seems unlikely…

Knurling

That's an antique silver thimble showing off its knurling: the indentations that allow for a better grip than would be provided by the original smooth surface, generally applied by using one or more very hard rollers that contain the reverse of the pattern to be imposed. It's not just thimbles: tool handles, knobs, and barbell grips are among the other strong candidates for knurling.

As for 'thimble', I like the story that’s it’s a derived form ‘thumb-ball’ as the original description of its protective role.

Laparoscopy

The cancer journey I’m on currently has a jargon of its own. Next up (as of February 2023) is a laparoscopy – whereby the doctor looks inside the abdomen with a laparoscope, a thin, flexible tube with a light and a small video camera on the end. Normally the laparoscope is inserted through the belly button, which provides the shortest distance from the skin to the inside of the abdominal cavity, and allows the incision inside the button, especially if – like mine – it is concave. The term can be traced to the Greek lapara – flank - though it’s hard to think of the belly button as on the flank.

Lovat

Whether or not you have a passion for tweed, lovat is as close to love as you can get, at least in a dictionary.

Lovat: a tweed of muted green colour. Pictured is the The Kinloch Anderson Day Kilt Jacket in Green Lovat Tweed – ‘shorter than a trouser jacket but not as short as the Coatee evening jacket. It has a double vent at the back and can be worn open or fastened at the top button. There are two Staghorn effect buttons on the jacket and one on each cuff.’ The image was almost of a flower: Oxford English Dictionary goes from the umbellifer 'lovage' to 'lovat' and on to 'love'.

Liger / tigon

Their ranges don’t overlap, so there’s no chance in the wild of lions mating with tigers. Yet it can be brought about in captivity. You might expect a liger (offspring of a lion and tigress) to be rather similar to a tigon (offspring of a tiger and a lioness), but it’s not entirely so. The tigon is smaller than the liger, because female lions are quite a bit smaller than female tigers, even though male lions are of similar size to male tigers. To put it another way, male lions are up to 35% heavier than females, whereas male tigers are only 15% bigger than females.

Lignify

To lignify is to make or become woody. Sean Landers illustrates that wittily through his alter ego character ‘Plank Boy’ – painted to resemble woodgrain, sometimes sculpted in bronze with the same surface effect, but never I think actually made of wood. Here's he caught in what could be the self-faking process...

The illustration is Sean Landers: ‘Plank Boy (Pygmalion)’, 2019 - Oil on linen, 210 x 150 cm

Lunker

Pass the salt… This – landed with rod and reel 10 miles off the Norwegian island of Soroya in 2013 – is the biggest cod ever caught: 47 kilograms and almost as long as its captor, German fisherman Michael Eisele. That would do 200 normal portions of fish and chips, making it a definite lunker.

Lunker: exceptionally large example of animal species, especially fish

Lunular

An obvious word, with a little thought, but a nice one. And what could be less like the moon, lunularity apart, than a red hot chilli pepper? Is that, by the way, a red-hot chilli-pepper, or a red hot-chilli pepper? Either way, most peppers range from 100 (a sweet bell pepper) to 350,000 Scoville Heat Units, but exceptional levels of up to 3,000,000 SHUs are possible. A pepper spray for defence purposes is likely to be 2,000,000 SHUs+. Figures aren't available for the moon, but few cheeses have any SHUs at all.

Lunular: crescent-shaped

Mahlstick

A mahlstick is a lightweight rod with a padded, soft leather or cork ball on one end, used by painters to steady their hand while working on detailed, high-precision areas without touching wet paint. It rests on the edge of the easel or canvas, enabling better control. The word derives from the German and Dutch Malstock or maalstok 'painting stick', from malen 'to paint'. The mahlstick often appears as part of the painter's equipment in pre-20th century paintings of artists: here I have stuck with the subset of female painters – all three having gained increasing recognition in recent years.

Those are self-portraits with mahlsticks by Michaelina Wautier (1649) Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1785) and Sofonisba Anguissola (c 1557)

Matriphagy

There are some 3,300 different pseudoscorpions: tiny arachnids – a millimetre, rather than a centimetre, being a typical length - with pincer-like pedipalps that resemble those of scorpions. The mothering instinct seems particularly strong in them, as if insufficient food is available to feed her young, the mother pseudoscorpion will stand still to invite the young to feed… on her. ‘They focus on the joints, where the exoskeleton is thinnest’, according to Joanna Bagniewska’s grisly account in ‘The Modern Bestiary’, ‘and literally suck her dry. When she is just an empty shell, she is cast aside, and the young nymphs, energised by the meal, venture out to hunt cooperatively.’ That is matriphagy.

Mease

Mease is a rare enough word that an image search throws it up primarily as an American surname, mostly borne by long-haired women and bearded men. Here are Kurt, Alma, Philip, Tonya; Dailisa, Paul, Leslie, Edward; Jon, Sarah, Darrell, Julie; Jessica, Quentin, Anna and John Mease. Names apart, a mease is a unit of 500 herrings, though I saw no evidence of fishmongery in what information the net provides on this not-all-that-measly sample – albeit, if they were herrings, the 16 of them would make up only 3% of a mease.

Masseter

Any model worthy of the profession needs good masseters, they being both the muscles for opening and closing the mouth for optimal pouting, and a key element in establishing the right cheek line. Here’s Yael Selbia, an Israeli voted top in the 2020 TC Candler 100 Most Beautiful Faces of the Year awards, which has been running since 1990, though it was news to me in 2022… Yael (born 2001) slipped to 6th in 2021, perhaps because she was by then serving in the Israeli Air Force, but has been near the top every year since 2017. Those must be good masseters, then.

Meldrop

‘Meldrop’ doesn’t get in every dictionary, but I like the 1934 Merriam-Webster definition: ‘a pendent drop, as of mucus at the nose, or of dew’. Yours may well be mucus, mine is always dew. It seems to come from Old Scots in the 15th century, deriving from ‘mél’, a snaffle bit, leading to ‘mél-dropi’, the foam from a horse's mouth from mouthing the bit.

Mirlygoes

‘Mirlygoes’ is one of the many rare words of Scots origin used by Hugh MacDiarmid in the long poem ‘A Drunk Man Looks at The Thistle’ (1926). Lines 2,371-2,376 (!) read:

And let me pit in guid set terms

My quarrel wi' th' owre sonsy rose,

That roond about its devotees

A fair fat cast o' aureole throws

That blinds them in its mirlygoes,

To the necessity o' foes.

That takes something like the view that the English bathe so contentedly in a circle of their own light that its dizzying effect stops them seeing that they will always have enemies. Accordingly, I searched for ‘dizzy thistle’ and came up with the ‘Dizzy Thistle Dress’ made by Rodebjer. Absolutely the garment to wear while reading the epic: I guess MacDairmid’s book is in the handbag, though I worried a little that the bag, and hence the book inside it, seems to have been stolen after the first shot of the three.

'Mirlygoes' - dizzyness

Mnemokinesis

It must be the dream of every dictator: if only they could control memories reliably, suppressing the real and inserting the false to achieve a seamless influence beyond the practical scope of cruder weapons such as censorship and repression…

Mnemokinesis - control of memories

Mommune

As of 2020, 20% of families were headed by a single mother, double the rate in 1960. Factors in the rise include including decreased social stigma associated with divorce, a higher number of mothers leaving unhealthy relationships, and more opportunities for single mothers to work remuneratively. But it’s tough, so the mutual support, built-in childcare and rental sharing advantages of single mothers living together are attractive. Hence the mommune, a communal arrangement of mothers, has become prevalent enough to justify a coinage.

Monodonts

The narwhal is generally cited as the obvious example of a one-toothed animal, but I’m not so sure. True, they are known for the single sword-like spiral tusk, a dental development which protrudes from their heads. Yet consider: both males and females are born with two small teeth embedded in their skulls, not one. Only in males does the front left tooth normally grow into a spiral tusk up to 10 feet long, so the description does little for the vast majority of females, though 3% of them do develop a (small) tusk. Moreover, 1 in 500 males develop a second tusk from the other tooth. Monodonts? It seems a superficial claim.

Mononym

A mononym is a name composed of only one word. An individual who is so known is mononymous. That tends to require fame, making mononymity the very opposite of anonymity. Getting known that way is a good sign of career success for musicians in particular, as per such as Adele, Beyoncé, Bono, Cher, Dido, Donovan, Drake, Eminem, Fish, Liberace, Lorde, Lulu, Madonna, Morrissey, Nico, Pink, Rihanna, Sade, Slash and Sting. On the other hand Elvis wasn’t mononymous, even though the one name was plenty, because ‘Presley’ remained in play. In contrast, nothing is added – indeed, confusion could be caused in many cases – if those twenty are expanded to Adele Adkins, Beyoncé Knowles, Paul Hewson, Cherilyn Sarkisian, Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong, Donovan Leitch, Aubrey Drake Graham, Marshall Bruce Mathers III, Derek William Dick, Władziu Valentino Liberace, Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor, Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie, Madonna Louise Ciccone, Steven Patrick Morrissey, Christa Päffgen, Alecia Moore, Robyn Rihanna Fenty, Helen Folasade Adu, Saul Hudson and Gordon Sumner.

I feel there’s an extra attraction to the monosyllabic monomym – shall we term it the monomononym? – so my illustration is of the six in my list who so qualify: Lorde, Cher, Pink, Slash, Fish and Sting. I see I forget Prince and Suggs, and no doubt many more... Anyway, perhaps Cher is the Queen of the Monomononym, as hers is not a stage name but her real name contracted, which makes it harder to achieve unique recognition. She's also, so far as I know, the only one of my twenty to have legally changed her name to her mononym.

Mukbang

From hallyu, the rise of South Korean culture in the 21^st century, comes the bizarre phenomenon of mukbang - an online broadcast or uploaded video of a host preparing and - primarily – consuming food, the associated chomping and slurping noises being a big part of it. The difference from comparable western programmes is the emphasis on the eating rather than the cooking. I watch neither, but at least I see the logic of a programme telling you how to make a meal you would not otherwise have been able to make. Do we need to learn how to eat? I can’t see why, but the phenomenon has spread worldwide. Anyway, I was the 17,241,359th – and probably most baffled – viewer of the mukbang posted by Sulgi, a.k.a. 설기양. Her ASMR MUKBANG, a 25 minute fire spicy noodles party (Cream Carbonara, Cheese, Black bean, ROSE Tteokbokki) is most notable for how she swallows three boiled eggs by way of warm-up to guard her stomach against the spiciness to come…

Mumchance

The somewhat archaic ‘mumchance’ indicates a person who has nothing to say – or at any rate is silent. It’s also the title of this painting by Aaron Smith, who describes his work as ‘the belle époque on acid’. The matchingly-bewhiskered American artist collects photographs of Victorian and Edwardian era men, attracted to their combination of spectacularly bearded faces and distinguished attire with stiff poses and serious expressions that ‘belie an existential vulnerability’. According to Smith’s website his work ‘has found support from a convergence of interrelated subcultures including Neo-Dandyism and Bear Culture, as well as Beard and Mustache Enthusiasts. The artist shares a desire to revel in the exaggeration of masculinity's archetypes, mining past forms of male identity in an attempt to free them of any heteronormative constraints’. The subject may be dumb, then, but his depiction does say something.

Aaron Smith: ‘Mumchance’, 2013 – oil on panel, 40 x 36 inches

Nath

Hindu tradition dictates that on the wedding night, the bride wears a nose chain – or nath – which is hooked by a chain to either the earring or hair. That brings good fortune by showing respect and devotion to Parvati, considered the Goddess of marriage. Maharashtra women have traditionally tended to wear the most elaborate naths, normally on the left side of the nose. The word hasn’t reached the OED yet, but it does include ‘nathless’, which doesn’t mean ‘lacking a nose ring’ but something similar to ‘nevertheless’.

Nidicolous

Not quite ridiculous, no. An avian term…

Nidifigous birds’ hatchlings are born after feathers have grown on them, and leave the nest shortly after hatching. Those nests are minimal. The yellow-wattled lapwing, for example, emerges ready to walk away from the pebbles among which it was camouflaged as an egg.

Nidicolous birds’ hatchlings are born without feathers, and remain in the nest for a time after hatching. Those nests are well-constructed. The robin is typical enough.

'Nidiculous' is a handy word, but how different is it from 'altricial'? I have generously included both...

Nychthemeron

‘Where can we live but days?’ asked Philip Larkin, rather famously. One answer would be ‘nychthemerons’. Not so quite catchy, I grant, which may be why we still use the ambiguous ‘day’ to refer to a 24 hour period, when we mean a day and night, say 08.00 on Tuesday to 08.00 on Wednesday. A nychthemeron is a 24 hour period that can start at any time, not just midnight.

The photos are the maximal light contrast points of a nychthemeron, as seen in Singapore, the latter taken during the 15-minute laser show that lights up the unique ship-like rooftop of the Marina Bay Sands hotel every evening. The 5-star hotel has 2,500 rooms, a shopping mall with faux-canals and Italian gondola rides, Singapore’s largest ice-skating rink, two nightclubs, a host of restaurants, and one of the world’s most expensive casinos. The most striking feature, though, is what looks like a cruise ship balancing precariously across the top of the three towers: it’s a 340m long sky park, holding a 150 m ‘infinity swimming pool’.

Oblate

Not the most obscure word, I concede, but far from common, and I like how it has two very distinct, etymologically unrelated, meanings:

- as an adjective: of a spheroid, that it is flattened at the poles (just like the Earth - its equatorial diameter is some 0.3% larger than its polar diameter). From the Latin oblatus (from ob- ‘inversely’ + -latus ‘carried’).

- as a noun: a person who is dedicated to a religious life, but has not yet taken full monastic vows. So, for example, if in the 15th century parents wished their daughter to become a nun, she was likely to join an order well before she reached the qualifying age of 16 for taking the vows. From the medieval Latin oblatus, past participle of Latin offerre ‘to offer’.

It seems unlikely that any religious oblates are to be found at the earth’s poles, so hopes of combining the two turn on the question: do oblates wear anything oblate? The coif seems the most plausible candidate, that is the white cotton cap within a nun’s headpiece. It goes along with a bandeau to secure it, a white wimple (to cover the neck and cheeks) and guimpe (to cover the chest – now that I chance upon it, that’s a word I don’t recall coming across before). Normally the coif, oblate of not, is covered by the veil, helpfully removed in the images above.

Oliprance

Oliprance precedes precipitation? Ostentation's anterior to a descent? It’s hard not to feel pleased with oneself for having so many words on tap, but maybe I should stick to pride, coming before a fall.

An online search will indicate that there are far more images of women looking in mirrors than of men doing the same. And that the women tend to be sitting, the men standing - often while fiddling with ties. The stereotyping implication is that a man might be expected to ask ‘what does this look like?’ but not ‘what do I look like?’. ‘Oliprance’ is pride or vanity, according to the OED.

Omnivert / Ambivert

Two words for the price of one… Everyone’s aware of the binary contrast of introvert and extrovert, but what about those who fit easily into neither? They can be classified as omniverts or ambiverts. Omniverts are inconsistent types who can be introvert or extrovert, depending on the situation they’re in. Ambiverts score towards the middle of the range on a consistent basis, exhibiting a balance of introvert and extrovert traits.

Oread

An Oread is a mountain nymph, Echo being the best known. Yet the Oreads are just one class of the minor goddesses from Greek myth who – handily for many a classical artist – take the form of attractive young women. So just how many types of nymph are there? Some are classified by the company they keep, or their role: Bacchae (or Maenads, or Thyiades) are the wild, orgiastic companions of Dionysus; Lampades are the torch-bearing nymphs of the underworld... Most are linked – surprisingly specifically - to the environments they inhabit as spirits of nature: Alseids are the nymphs of groves; Anthusae of flowers; Aurae of cooling breezes; Bucolae of rustic places; Crenaeae of wells and fountains; Dryads of trees and forests; Epimelides of highland pasture; Haliae of the sea, sands and rocky shores; Heleionomae of fresh-water marshes and wetlands; Leimenides of water meadows; Limnatides of lakes; Meliae of honey, bees and honeydew; Nephelae of the clouds; Pegaeae of springs; Potameides of the rivers… I dare say there are others. Now the term ‘nymph’, applied to a woman, tends to shade into two extensions. Nabakov coined ‘nymphette’ in Lolita (1955) to refer to ‘maidens between the age limits of nine and fourteen… who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic’. Or else there’s nymphomaniac or the slangy ‘nympho’ – which doesn’t seem too justified looking at the totality of nymphs: perhaps ‘Bacchaemaniac’ would have been a better term.

Echo lived on Mount Kithairon. Zeus was attracted to her, but Hera, his wife and Queen of the Gods, followed him trying to catch them together. Echo would engage Hera in long-winded conversations, enabling Zeus to make his escape. Realising what was going on, Hera cursed Echo to only be able to repeat the last words that another person just said. According to Ovid’s 'Metamorphoses', she then pursued the self-absorbed Narcissus, who fell in love with his own beauty as reflected in a pool and was transformed into a flower. Unable to tell him of her feelings, Echo faded away, so all that was left was her voice repeating the words of passers-by. Echo was popular as a solo subject in the Victorian-Edwardian era: here are the versions of George Frederick Watts (1846), Talbot Hughes (1900), Robert Payton Reid (1906), Alexandre Cabane (1874)and Edward Reginald Frampton (c 1915). For Oreads in bulk, the go-to work is French: William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s titillating ‘Les Oréades’ (1902).

Oscular

Owners kiss their pets all the time, but I find that a bit creepy. Is it just me, or is this a boundary in human-animal relations, in recognising the agency / rights of the non-human, that will be redrawn at some stage?

Oscular: pertaining to kissing

Osmoregulation

When we say someone drinks like a fish, what sort of fish do we have in mind? Saltwater fish do indeed need to drink to survive, but fresh water fish don’t. In freshwater, the inside of the fish has a higher salt concentration (1%) than the surrounding environment (0%). Water moves into the fish by osmosis, passively, through the gills and the skin and the stomach. Fish have to eliminate all this excess water by producing large volumes of dilute urine. In saltwater, the environment is saltier (3%), so the fish loses water passively, and has to drink. The excess salt is excreted primarily in highly concentrated urine.

That leaves the question of how a salmon manages, given that it lives in both salt and fresh water at different times. As you’d expect, it drinks copiously in the sea, but not at all in rivers. And the urine function varies with the environment. In addition, salmon have specialised gills that enable them to transport both salt against the concentration gradients, pumping salt out of the salmon’s blood into salt water and out of the fresh water into the salmon’s blood – the opposite of what osmosis would otherwise bring about (as that process seeks to equalise the concentrations in different liquids coming together). It’s fair to say, then, that salmon are masters of osmoregulation.

Osmosis: the passage of a liquid through a membrane from a less concentrated solution to a more concentrated one. Osmoregulation: the maintenance of constant osmotic pressure in the fluids of an organism by the control of water and salt concentrations.

Ossicones

What do you call the horns on a giraffe? Well, not horns: they are ossicones, the small, fur-covered protuberances found only in the superfamily Giraffoidea, the still-living members of which are the giraffe and the okapi. And, unlike giraffes (see 'oscular', just above), female okapis do not have ossicones, they only have hair whorls. Ossicones consist of a highly vascularized and innervated bone core covered with similarly vascularized and innervated skin. Males use them, like antlers or horns, in mating-related combat.

Easy question, then: which is the female okapi? And if you need to distinguish a giraffe from an okapi, the former’s blunter ossicones are something of a giveaway.

Paraph

One of history’s best-known – and most value-generative – signatures is that of Pablo Picasso. The question is: does the underline count as a paraph, or is the term reserved for more elaborate squiggles? The underline itself exploits the absence of a lower-case g,j,p,q or y in Picasso’s name – not a particularly rare feature, though Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock and Paul Klee - to take three of the 20th century’s other greatest artists - didn’t exploit that shared lexicological characteristic in a comparable way.

Paraph: a flourish after a signature

Pentomino

Into the world of recreational mathematics… a pentomino is one of the twelve distinct planar shapes that can be formed by joining five identical squares by their edges. That doesn’t count reflections and rotations as separate (which would bring it to a less easily managed 63). A standard pentomino puzzle is to tile a rectangular box with the pentominoes, i.e. cover it without overlap and without gaps. Each of the 12 pentominoes has an area of 5 unit squares, so the box must have an area of 60 units. Some sizes are easier than others: the 6×10 case has 2,339 solutions, the 5×12 box has 1,010 solutions, the 4×15 box has 368 solutions, and the 3×20 box has just two solutions. The illustration is one of the many 6 x 10 box solutions, simply because I find it the most visually attractive. Perhaps there’s scope for an artist to use the pentomino puzzle as the basis for a series of abstract paintings?

Perdricide

Alan Partridge may be the only comedian with a word in waiting should he be murdered for real, rather than just dying on the stage. More seriously, though, what are the ethics of shooting partridge, now that foxes are protected? According to the League Against Cruel Sports, over 50m game birds are released annually in the UK, many of them imported from intensive rearing abroad, with no welfare standards applied to how they are raised or transported. And then up to 40% are wounded, rather than killed outright: many are then left to die slowly when they are not retrieved by people or dogs. So my picture shows one of the luckier partridges…

Perdricide: killing partridges, especially for sport. Partridge: one of those words with a plurality of plurals.

Perigee

There’s a curious point of asymmetry in the words associated with the orbit of satellites. They follow an elliptical path with the earth not in the exact centre of the orbital pattern. When a satellite is at its furthest point from the earth, it is at the apogee of the orbit. When a satellite is at its closest point to the earth, it is at the perigee of the orbit. ‘Apogee’ is a fairly common word in everyday non-astronomical speech, being the highest development or climax of a phenomenon. ‘Perigee’ is much rarer, having picked up no general usage to cover a low or primitive point. I wonder why not?

Anyway, the primary body for observing the contrast is the moon. In 2021, for example, the moon’s mean distance from earth was 384,400 km. Its closest perigee was at 356,794 km and its farthest apogee at 406,512 km. That’s a difference of some 50,000 km. It means that a full moon at perigee-syzygy, to use the technical term for a ‘supermoon’, will appear roughly 14% larger in diameter than the average moon. It will also appear some 14% brighter (the moon's surface luminance remains the same, but because it is closer to the earth the illuminance increases). Compare with the apogee, and the differences roughly double.

The top image shows the comparative appearance of the moon from the earth at the points explained in the diagram.

Pinguescence

Where is the worst place to store fat? Probably the heart. But the question may be academic: so far as I know, there’s no way to control the geography of pinguescence – the process of becoming fat.

Plastron

We could all do with an emotional plastron to cover our vulnerabilities.

This plastron is on the underside of a turtle. The term ‘plastron’ has also been applied to human body armour.

Platen

A platen is the large, rubber-coated cylindrical roller inside the carriage of a typewriter. It holds paper as typebars strike it, providing a firm but cushioned surface for clear, even impressions. The rubber layer absorbs the strikes of the metal keys without damaging them. and makes sure that prints are clear.

Platen is also – being where I found it – the last word of Matthew Francis’ wonderful evocation of the typewriter, from the perspective of 2018. Wait for it!

Typewriter

One day I’ll fetch the Smith Corona from the cupboard,
set it on the desk and unclasp its blue plastic shell
to expose the nakedness of its baby-grand workings.

Remember the punch and peck words had in those days,
the strain of Q in the little finger, the type head
leaning out on its stalk from its semicircular roost,

the angelus ting that marked the end of a line
the slap of the silver lever that jerked time forward,
the shift key that tilted the world on its fulcrum,

the grey formalities hedged by tabs and margins
that turned language into geometry, the braille
of the other side of the page under the fingertips?

What was struck here could never be unstruck,
in spite of backspacing and xs, packets of Tipp–Ex paper
and the vial of Snopake, its screw-cap gritted shut.

Not used to taking ourselves so seriously, we prodded
at the ampersand tangled in its nest, the curly brackets
aiming their bows in opposite directions.

Switch on the anglepoise lamp; outside the window
it’s carbon-paper dark. There’s ribbonsmudge on your fingers
and a new sheet of foolscap rolled into place on the platen.

Plumicorn

Birds and people hear pretty similarly, even though birds don’t have an external ear structure. Rather, their ear entrances are covered by auricular coverts, circles of soft loose-webbed feathers. Many owls, you might counter, do have external ears. However, these are just tufts of feathers: they have no connection to the skeletal structure of the ear and aren’t used to direct sound to its opening. Their true purpose is uncertain, but is likely to include camouflage, courtship, and communication, including to signal aggression to other owls. The technical term for such tufts is plumicorns (say 'plume-i-corn'), from the Latin for ‘feather-horn’.

Pictured is the Long-Eared Owl (Asio otus), the common name of which is likely to compound any confusion about whether the plumicorns are true ears.

Praeteria

What’s the opposite of nostalgia? You could see that as looking forward hopefully rather than pining for the past. Perhaps that’s ‘optimism’ or ‘futurism’. But I mean ‘what’s the opposite view of the past?’ To regret it perhaps, and blame it for what’s gone wrong. Not because you wish you hadn't taken certain actions - that's 'remorse' or 'penitence' - but for the fact that the past happened at an impersonal level. But is there a word for that? My wife and I brainstormed the question using the roots of ‘nostalgia’ as a starting point. The OED gives that as a 17th century compound of the Greek νόστος (nóstos), the Homeric term for ‘homecoming’, and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning ‘sorrow’: in current usage that has come to stand for a sentimental longing for of a period now gone. To express something like ‘I regret the past’ as an antonym of ‘nostalgia’ might be μετανιώνω για το παρελθόν (metanióno gia to parelthón), but Latin seems more promising: 'I regret the past' would be ‘Paenitet me praeterita’. That might yield the edited compound: ‘praeteria’, echoing 'nostalgia' a little. So there we have it: ‘Praeteria’, regret for the past, a potential word I now propose, likely to become increasingly useful as the effects of the industrial revolution come home to roost…

The image negates a classic of Japanese landscape nostalgia: Kawase Hasui’s ‘April: Bamboo Forest, Tama River’, 1952.

Peen

The end of a hammer opposite the face is known as its peen. That often takes a claw shape, useful for levering out mal-hammered nails. But ball-peen hammers are also common. There is something of the penile glans about them, a 'peenis', perhaps, but is it such a useful hammer shape? According to Wikipedia ‘The peening face is useful for rounding off edges of metal pins and fasteners, such as rivets. The ball face of the hammer can also be used to make gaskets for mating surfaces. A suitable gasket material is held over the surface where a corresponding gasket is desired, and the operator will lightly tap around the edges of the mating surface to perforate the gasket material’. It's on theme to get mating in, I suppose, but they don’t sound like operations I’m likely to carry out as often as yanking a nail…

Phage

It’s one thing not to have heard of a life form, another to find that it’s the most populous on the planet! The world’s human population is currently 8 bn, so not quite 10¹⁰, which is 10 bn. More than enough, perhaps, but there are estimated to be 10³¹ phages, almost unimaginably more than us. Indeed, more than the population of all other life forms combined.

A bacteriophage, also known informally as a phage is a virus that infects and replicates within bacteria and archaea. They have medical potential as a means of attacking bacteria. In particular, antibiotic-resistant superbugs cause a large number of deaths around the world each year, but effective new antibiotics are thin on the ground - so bacteria-eating phage viruses could be the answer.

Pica

Pica (say PIE-kuh) is a feeding disorder in which someone beyond the exploratory toddler stage feels compelled to eat non-food substances that have no nutritional value, such as paper, soap, paint, hair, stones, crayons, chalk or ice.

Not a joking matter, but these attractive ‘crayon pebbles' might tick two boxes for some…

Ptarmical

What is ptarmical? Pepper, most obviously. Or anything infectious that needs clearing from your nostrils. Or possibly some emotional states. Even sunlight in some people, the condition known as photosneezia. Nor is sneezing restricted to homo sapiens: most animals do it, and the pairing here is with Camelus dromedaries.

Ptarmical: causing sneezing

Proteose

Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary… ‘Proteose: a polypeptide produced by a partial proteolysis’. Hard not to be impressed by an obscure p-word defined by reference to another two obscure p-words (and couple of common ones). Might this be the most heavily alliterated definition in the OED? ‘Polypeptide’ being ‘an organic polymer consisting of a large number of amino acid residues bonded together in a chain’, while ‘Proteolysis’ is the splitting of molecules by the action of enzynes. So it’s a certain type of water-soluble compound in chemistry.

More specifically, Proteose peptone – as illustrated - is a highly nutritious peptone used in microbiology to cultivate bacteria and fungi that have high nutritional requirements.

Pteridomania

Two things are nice about the term for fern fever. First, the specific historical context: it arose from the Victorian craze for ferns – collecting them from around the world, building ferneries to hold them, using them as a motif in decorative arts and beyond… Second, the origin of the word as a literary coinage by Charles Kingsley in his 1855 book ‘Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore’: ‘Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing 'Pteridomania' ... and wrangling over unpronounceable names of species’. He derived the term from ‘Pteridophytes’ and ‘mania’, the former being plants that reproduce by means of spores, rather than flowers and seeds: ferns, horsetails and mosses…

The pteridomaniacal peak – around 1845-1890 – largely coincided with William Morris’s production of wallpaper from the 1860’s onward, so it’s curious that ferns don’t feature much in his designs. Hence my illustration is of a modern wallpaper somewhat inspired by the Morris manner.

Pyxidium

You’re a seed pod. What to do? One answer is: nothing - assume that birds or animals will rip into you at some point and release your seeds. Else you can release the seeds through small pores, poppy-style, so that the motion caused by the wind shakes them out - as if you were a pepper pot. If neither suits, you need to split. That’s called dehiscence, and can be pretty explosive: the sandbox tree can fling seeds up to 100 metres. Where to split? Maybe along the septa - like the foxglove; or along the locules – like the iris. Or you can pop your top off, like the lid from a box. If that circumscissile opening is your choice, you’re a pyxidium: on a eucalyptus, perhaps, or on the illustrated scarlet pimpernel Anagallis arvensis – in which case, if you don’t mind me saying, you’re one of the most beautiful pods.

Pyxidium: a seed capsule opening by transverse dehiscense (OED)

Quotity

Is this a qoutity?

I think not. Whereas

these seventeen syllables

make up a haiku.

‘Quotity’ is a certain number of individuals etc, a nice contrast to the less specific nature of a quantity. A haiku, at least under the not-all-that-authentic western conventions, consists of the inviolable quotity of 17 syllables arranged in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively. The image is of the Korean band Seventeen, taken in 2021. It has thirteen members, potentially undermining its status as a quotity equivalent to a haiku or a football team. There is an explanation: ‘Seventeen’ stands for ‘13 members + 3 units + 1 team’, representing the 13 individual members from 3 different units (hip-hop, vocal, and performance) who all come together to form the one K-pop group. Still, I'm not sure this Seventeen is a quotity. It may be, of course, that the question refers to itself, not to the band, in which case I'd say that the number of words / syllables / letters in 'Is this a quotity?' is too arbitrary a matter to make it a satisfying example - though it does contain seventeen characters, if we're including the spaces.

Ratite

Flightless birds – or ratites – are a group: penguins are a separate matter, but kiwis and the former dodo are related to emu and ostrich, not to other birds of their size. Ostrich eggs are big: typically 1.6 litres, they take around 90 minutes to hard boil and make a more-than-substantial omelette, as above. They’re small, though, up against the eggs of the Madagascan Aepyornis family of ‘elephant birds’, which had eggs with up to nine litres of content. One theory for their extinction by 1800 is that sailors ate the eggs, sealing the birds’ fate, even though the three metre high adults weren’t easy to hunt.

Ravelin / Tenaillon

The jargon of fortresses is extensive: to cite caponier, casemate, cavalier, citadel, contrescarpe, cordon and countergard is merely to seize on some ‘c’s. Ravelins are triangular fortifications located just outside the castle. They’re numbered 1-7 in the diagram of the Castell de Sant Ferran in Figueres, Spain – the largest bastion fort in Europe, constructed 1753-92, and so extensive it has names for each ravelin, the highlighted No, 7 being the Ravelin of Rosario. The ravelins are in front of the curtain walls (29 in the diagram) and bastions (9, 11 and 30). The countergards, to return to the ‘c’s above, are 17 and 18. The outer edges of the ravelin are configured to divide an assault force, and guns in the ravelin can fire upon the attacking troops as they approach the curtain wall. The ravelin also impedes besiegers from using their artillery to batter a breach. True, I was aware of ravelins: the word that led me to them in a random flick through the OED was the more obscure ‘tenaillon’: a work constructed on each side of a ravelin to increase its strength, procure additional ground beyond the ditch, or cover the shoulders of the bastions. And that, I suspect, is what the Castell de Sant Ferran lacks. Perhaps they were part of the plans, not all of which were ever built.

Recure

Here’s an illogical word. If ‘cure’ means to make better, shouldn’t ‘recure’ mean to make better again, presumably after a second bout of the same illness? It doesn’t: OED gives it as a synonym of ‘cure’, derived from ‘recover’ rather than ‘re-cure’. No wonder it’s pretty much re-dundant. Except that ‘Re-Cure’ is an American tribute band, formed in 2014, playing the songs of The Cure, their name given an extra dimension by the existence of that apparently useless word ‘recure’.

The image is not of The Cure’s Robert Smith, but of Re-Cure’s vocalist, Tim.

Rhinocasus

OK, I made this one up. Rhinotomy is mutilation, usually amputation, of the nose. Historically, it has been a means of judicial punishment throughout the world, particularly for sexual transgressions, but in the case of adultery often applied only to women. Nasty business. It is to be distinguished from a rhinectomy, which is the surgical removal of part – usually – of a nose for more positive, medical, reasons such as getting rid of cancer. Either way, I’d sooner see it happen to statues, and that is a rather common occurrence in ancient examples. Maybe a third word is required for that: 'rhinocasus', perhaps. That combines ‘rhino’ – pertaining to the nose – with ‘casus’ – Latin for accident.

Rhyparography

An odd word, as it is defined as both ‘the depiction of mean, unworthy, or sordid subjects’, and ‘the painting of genre or still-life pictures’. Even allowing that still life and genre pictures had, in classical times, lower status than portrait, landscape and especially history painting, that seems somewhat contradictory. Yet maybe not: Rembrandt is generally considered the greatest etcher ever, and the potentially sordid subject of beggars, as well as the somewhat minor subject of a shell, are comparably invested with dignity and importance here, in two of his finest prints.

‘The Shell’, 1650, is the only still life among Rembrandt van Rijn’s 300 etchings. There are many beggars, though, often cast in biblical roles. Of ‘Beggar Seated on a Bank’, 1630, Princeton University’s catalogue says: ‘In this free and wiry etching, Rembrandt lends his own features to a seated vagabond with ragged cloak and scraggly beard, who stretches out his hand to beg as he snarls at us. Unique among Rembrandt’s many exercises in role-playing, this self-identification with the down-and-out has been recently interpreted as a humorous response to the challenge of being a struggling artist who is reduced to begging for recognition from wealthy patrons.’

Rhytiphilia

The sexual parts must be the most likely candidates for agastopia, the fascination for a particular part of the human body. Foot fetishism - podophilia - is said to be the most common form of it for otherwise non-sexual body parts. I’m guessing that the glabella (qv) is among the least frequently fetishised parts. That said, the somewhat broader rhytiphilia is a thing: taking a particular interest in the patterns of facial wrinkles. I wonder whether WH Auden’s famous ‘wedding cake left out in the rain’ look appeals to rhytiphiliacs. David Hockney’s line on him was: ‘if that's his face, imagine his scrotum!’ As for why Auden developed such a geological visage by his fifties, Richard Davenport-Hines explains, in his biography, that the poet (1907-73) suffered from Touraine-Solente-Gole syndrome ‘in which the skin of the forehead, face, scalp, hands and feet becomes thick and furrowed and peripheral periostitis in the bones reduces the patient's capacity for activity. There was no therapy for the syndrome, which does not affect either life expectancy or mental status, but which accounted for Auden's striking appearance of grave, lined melancholy.’

Riggy

There’s no shortage of definitions for ‘rig’ – the OED offers ten, including the equipage on a horse-drawn vehicle – but not the more specialised horse meaning, which is the only one which seems to lead to regular adjectival use, at least among equestrians. A gelding is a castrated stallion, which ideally means both testicles are removed. Most strictly defined, a rig is a stallion which is castrated, but is found – as some 10-15% are – to be a cryptorchid, meaning one of his testes has failed to drop into the scrotum. The male hormone testosterone is produced by the testicles, whether they are in their normal position or lurking somewhere inside the horse’s body. Unless the internal testicle can be found and removed by a cryptorchidectomy, rigs are likely to continue to display masculine behavioural characteristics, such as trying to cover in-season mares, herd mares, fight with other geldings or behave aggressively in general. Yet some fully castrated geldings still behave like stallions even after their supply of testosterone abates, likely due to brain changes occurring much earlier in their development: they are said to be ‘riggy’.

I didn’t land on the word ‘riggy’ in a dictionary: my pony-owning wife uses it… It seems to me it might usefully be extended to cover the many human cases of people reverting to prior behaviour after they have taken action – promises, training, rehab etc – intended to take them beyond it.

Riparian

‘Riparian’ isn’t an everyday word in the same way as ‘terrestrial’ ‘aerial’ or ‘aquatic’. That last can be split between ‘marine’, ‘riverine’ and ‘lacustrian’, the terms for river and lake dwellers being seen fairly rarely, too. Likewise ‘fossorial’ – living underground, though there you have ‘subterranean’ as well.

Riparian – living in the fringe habitats bordering freshwater ecosystems: the otter is the archetypal riparian. That’s the North American River Otter (Lontra Canadensis).

Roscid

It’s the particular richness of English that there are multiple words for many things - typically from Latin and Anglo Saxon roots. There’s nothing wrong with the word ‘dewy’ but it’s nice that there is an obscure alternative: ‘roscid’. Whether you can visually distinguish a dewed-upon leaf from a rained-upon leaf is another matter but either way I like this kind of image – in this case, no internet involved, it's a roscid picture of my own.

One might also ask: is there an equivalent word - more cause-specific then 'wet' - for 'rained-upon'? Perhaps English isn't always so rich... a contrast, perhaps, is indicated by the book 'Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words' by Miya Ando, 2025.

Rux

What a nice little word for a disturbance, commotion or uproar! Why have a ruckus when you can have a rux?

That particular rux is signal disturbance.

Rybička

That’s actually a Czech word, translatable as ‘Little Fish’, but importable into English in its original form a small pocket knife with the handle shaped as a fish, which became particularly popularity during the forty years of Communist rule (1948-89) . This one is the 5.5 cm blade Mikov 130-NZn-1, manufactured in Mikulášovice. Such folding knifes are frequently used in mushroom picking, something of a national sport and favoured family activity in the Czech Republic. I suppose mushroom-shaped knives would be more thematic, but not as practical…

I came across the word as the title of one of Czech artist Anna Ruth’s alluring paintings at Brooke Benington Gallery in 2025. It’s also a Polish surname, Natalia Rybicka, for example, being a well-known actress – but knives don’t come into that: ‘ryba’ is Polish for fish, and the suffix ‘icka’ is a common feminine form used in Polish surnames.

Scapulimancy

Scapulimancy strikes me as implausible, even if you’re forecasting the prices or health of cattle.

In Ancient China oracle bones were used for divination: if an ox scapula was used, that was ‘scapulimancy’. Questions were carved onto the bone using a sharp tool. Intense heat was then applied with a metal rod until the bone or shell cracked: the diviner would then interpret the pattern of cracks to answer the questions, and add the prognostication to what was written on the bone.

Scrod

Why call a young cod a codling when the tastier word ‘scrod’ is available?

Scrod: a small cod or haddock. In the wholesale fish business, scrod is the smallest weight category of the major whitefish.

Serac

A serac is a block or column of glacial ice, often formed by intersecting crevasses on a glacier. Commonly house-sized or larger, they are dangerous to mountaineers, since they may topple with little warning. The word is derived from the Swiss cheese sérac, a whey-based, soft and creamy by-product of hard cheese production.

I can see the resemblance. Perhaps there’s an etymological case for developing an ice-cream, to be known as serac². There are precedents: cheesecake ice-cream would hardly count, but cottage cheese ice-cream is a thing, and Queso is a Filipino ice cream flavour prepared using cheddar cheese.

Sible

I mistyped ‘single’ in a Gmail and was surprised to see that ‘sible’ wasn’t flagged as a spelling error – as I would have expected even if I’d meant ‘sibyl’ (a woman of antiquity reputed to possess powers of prophecy). So what does it mean? It doesn’t make the OED, and a search on Google itself comes up with two interesting but unpersuasive reasons to add it to future editions: an acronym for ‘Sheffield Institute of Biotechnological Law and Ethics’ or a slangy abbreviation of ‘sex bible’, as used to select the position of the day, for example. A visual search yields images of Sible Heddingham, a village in Essex with a population of 4,000. It looks a nice enough place, and includes the striking building illustrated. So I think I’ll take it that Sible Heddingham is the reason that Google’s mail service accepts the word.

Simurgh

Here are two modern interpretations of the Simurgh, a fantastical bird from Persian myth that’s effectively the Eastern equivalent of the Phoenix – like which, it can set itself alight yet return to life. The Simurgh is a bit of a shape-shifter, as early descriptions are of a peacock with a lion's body or paws and a dog's head, but it later took on a more birdlike guise with sharp teeth and beautiful plumage. The name conjoins two Persian words: ‘Si’ is thirty, ‘murgh’ is bird, hence the multiple colours and the story that it consists of thirty united birds. Consistent with that, the Simurgh is big and strong enough to fly with several pendant elephants dangling…

In the 12th-century allegorical Sufi poem by Farid ud-Din Attar, the birds of the world gather in search of a king. The Hoopoe, the wisest among them, suggests they seek the legendary Simurgh. The birds embark on an arduous journey, representing the spiritual path of Sufism, passing through seven valleys of trials. Most perish along the way: only thirty reach the Simurgh's dwelling place on Mount Qaf, the legendary mountain that marks the edge of the world. There, they look into a lake and see only their own reflection. They realise that they – the thirty birds – are the Simurgh, are what they seek: the majesty of the divine is a reflection of their own unified selves, and the individual self dissolves into the universal ‘oneness’ of existence.

Slee

Is ‘slee’ a word, outside of the self-refuting pre-dawn thought: ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to get back to slee…’? No, the dictionary passes sleekly enough from ‘sledge’ to ‘sleech’. So let me propose it: ‘a half-formed thought’. It is, however, Dutch for a sleigh. Never mind sheep: next time I can’t drop off, I’m going to imagine the slide-past of an infinite cavalcade of polar bears.

Smectic

This may be a chance to make art: the nematic phases of liquid crystal – in which the molecules are oriented in parallel but not arranged in well-defined planes – could be rendered in a crystalline liquid to make an abstract painting that enacts its molecular process. Or one could use a smetic patterning: 'smetic' denotes a state of a liquid crystal in which the molecules are oriented in parallel and arranged in well-defined planes.

Note: this is Figure 1 from the 2021 paper ‘Meta-stable nematic pre-ordering in smectic liquid crystalline phase transitions’ by Nasser Mohieddin Abukhdeir and Alejandro D. Rey, Department of Chemical Engineering, McGill University, Montreal. It shows ‘a schematic of a growing liquid crystalline front summarizing the phenomena of interest: nematic (orientational) and smectic-A (lamellar) liquid crystalline ordering and interfacial splitting. The orientationally/translationally-order smectic-A mesophase is on the left (blue), orientationally-ordered nematic mesophase is in the center (green), and the isotropic liquid (no orientational or translational order) is on the right (red).’

Smirr

The Inuit famously – if, it is sometimes said, mythically – have 50 words for snow. Climatic logic would suggest that the British should have 50 words for rain. And maybe we have… Consider ‘bange’ (long-term hovering dampness), ‘clarty’ (really wet), ‘dibble’ (slow droplets), ‘dreich’ (gloomy and wet), ‘dimpsey’ (low cloud and fine rain), ‘letty’ (enough to make outdoor work difficult) and ‘plothering’ (heavy rain). Another nice one is ‘smirr’ (or ‘smir’ or ‘smur’) – for the light end of drizzle. And it has a literary connection via a well-known Scots dialect poem. Here’s a verse incorporating the eponymous refrain of George Campbell Hay’s ‘The Smoky Smirr o Rain’ (1948):

The hills aroond war silent wi the mist alang the braes.

The woods war derk an’ quiet wi dewy, glintin’ sprays.

The thrushes didna raise for me, as I gaed by alane,

but a wee, wae cheep at passin’ in the smoky smirr o rain.

Why does rain fall in less-than-fully-formed drops? Water droplets in clouds initially form on microscopic airborne particles, or aerosols. Updrafts are plumes of warm air rising from the solar-heated Earth. As the droplets float within clouds, they continue to grow until the updrafts can't hold them up any longer. If the updrafts are weak, droplets fall out of the clouds as drizzle, before they have the opportunity to grow into full-sized raindrops. This, incidentally, helps explain the preponderance of smirr over the ocean, where updrafts are weaker.

Snotter

Is this mere snotter? Or doesn't it matter that I’d never heard of a simple word with five meanings?

Probably not, as there’s not a lot more to say…

Snotter: something of no importance / a length of rope with an eye spliced in each end / a fitting which holds the heel of a sprit close to the mast / to breathe heavily / to snivel

Solifluction

If I’d done A-level Geography, I guess this would have been routine – but I didn’t. Solifluction is the gradual movement of soil down a slope due to freeze-thaw cycles. It's a common process in cold regions, like the Arctic and Alps, where it contributes to sediment transport. It’s through solifluction that slow-moving arctic soils form patterns that, from a distance, resemble those found in viscous fluids, where competition between viscous and cohesive forces drives a suite of common instabilities in thin films. Why so? The downhill flow, rather than showing a broad sheet of evenly sliding material, instead forms finger-like ‘lobes’ of soil reaching out ahead of the main sheet as it moves, due to competition between gravity and cohesion or the 'stickiness' of soil grains . According to scientists ‘periodically frozen soil—a temporally evolving mixture of granular material, fluid, and ice—is one of the most complex natural materials found on planetary surfaces…These patterns form due to a combination of frost heave, in which segregation ice growth lofts soil upward, and gelifluction, a slow flow-like relaxation of partially saturated soil once it thaws in the summer… The study of this effect is especially important as we measure landscape response to climate change and aim to understand the storage and release of permafrost carbon in arctic landscapes. As we see permafrost thaw across the arctic, we will need to be able to predict and mitigate arctic slope instabilities.’

Rachel C. Glade et al, Arctic soil patterns analogous to fluid instabilities, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021) utilises quantitative connections with fluid and granular mechanics to better understand solifluction processes and patterns.

Spork

It’s pretty obvious what these are, and easy to conclude that ‘spork’ would be a good term for them - ‘foroon’ just wouldn’t have the same immediacy. So the only real question when this implement on the right arrived with my salad was: is ‘spork’ already a word? And it seems so: Merriam-Webster, for example, gives ‘a multipurpose eating utensil that combines the bowl of a spoon with the tines of a fork’. There are two types, though: those with tines on the bowl, as left, and those with bowl and tines at opposite ends, as I received. Perhaps, to improve referential precision, one of the options should take on the faroon name after all…

Soffit

I want to say that soffits are that part of a house’s roof in the term guidance above which I could not previously have named. But actually they're not really separate: both soffits and fascia are considered a part of the siding and installed by a siding contractor. Anyway, the point of the soffit is to allow airflow into the rafters and keep moisture away, so reducing the chance of mould, while also keeping pests out of the rafters. Having said which - and maybe this is a bungalow matter - our own roof (below) seems to be ‘all soffit and no fascia’, or at least, the fascia are pretty fully covered by the gutters, the hosting of which is, prima facie, the prime fascia function.

Speluncar

The Son Doong cave in Vietnam was discovered only in 1991. At some 9km in length, 200m in width and 150m in height, it is the largest currently known cave in the world and possibly the most spectacularly speluncar site. Towering stalactites form around a river running through a space so large it forms its own clouds. It contains unique animal species and rare ‘cave pearls’ - small balls of mineral deposits which form when water laden with minerals dripping from the ceiling falls too quickly to form a stalagmite.

‘Speluncar (adjective) - from the Latin spelunca, cave: of, pertaining to, or resembling a cave; of the nature of a cave’ – OED.

Stillomancy

Ithell Colquhoun (1906-88) experimented with many automatic methods of making art: decalcomania, entoptic graphomania, parsemage, fumage and stillomancy, for example. That last, initially developed by the Romanian surrealist, Dolfi Trost, involved dropping ink or paint to produce a blot on paper or canvas that is then folded down the middle, producing a symmetry about the axis of the fold. A fancy term, perhaps, for the basis of the Rorschach ink blot test. In 1971 Colquhoun used stillomancy to produce a number of drawings evoking the spirit of various trees, which she offered ‘to the White Goddess at a time when wasteful technology is threatening the plant life (and with it all the organic life) of earth and the waters.' ‘Dryad: Vine’, with its inventive mixture of arboreal, mammalian and avian associations, breaks down the conventional, scientific, boundaries of nature and emphasises its essential unity as a living force.

Struthious

Given that ‘Struthious’ means ‘of, or pertaining to, the ostrich’, and the most famous ostrich behaviour is ‘burying one’s head in the sand’, the adjective has come to be applied to people who blithely ignore problems. Yet the supposed origin in ratite behaviour is just a popular myth. That’s no surprise, as ostriches are well set up to defend themselves rather than hope danger will go away if they can’t see it. They’re up to nine feet tall with powerful legs, are likely to weigh over 20 stone - and pack a kick made ferocious by that stature. My image, then, is just a digital construction in support of the legend…

'Ratite', incidentally, also gets an entry. I guess that makes me a little struthious, in the more literal way.

Succiduous

Is the most succidious image ever? Adam and Eve stand beneath a tree of almost ridiculously ripe apples, the only question being whether they will fall before the fruit does. Whether this is an appropriate moral myth is another matter. As John Gray has asked: ‘Why would a benign God deny any knowledge of good and evil to the creatures it had created and then, when they acquired such knowledge, condemn them to a life of misery? If this God was omniscient, it knew in advance that they would breach the prohibition. The first humans, on the other hand, were too innocent to understand the punishment that God threatened; they knew nothing of death or labour, by which they would be cursed when they were expelled from the garden. A God that devised and enacted such a cruel drama would be a capricious tyrant, wreaking senseless suffering on the world it had created.’ It doesn’t amount to a justification, but I like Martin Luther’s rather surprising 16th century answer to the question of why Adam took and ate the fruit (as cited in Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve’, 2017): ‘He could scarcely have put it into words, but if compelled, he might have said: an eternity in this condition is unendurable. I hate the contemplation of the One who made me. I hate the overwhelming debt of gratitude. I hate God.’

Succiduous: ready to fall. This is the Courtauld’s ‘Adam and Eve’, 1526, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, one of 50 versions of the subject made by Cranach and his workshop. As the gallery explains: ‘Having bitten the fruit, Eve hands it to Adam. Although Lucas Cranach has represented him hesitant and seemingly bewildered, Adam will soon also taste it and the couple will be banished in punishment. Cranach’s carefully observed rendering of the peaceful animals creates a sense of serenity, soon to be lost. The placid lion and the lamb, on either side of the tree, will become natural enemies… However, the theme of redemption is also included. The vine, laden with grapes and spiralling up the tree, counters the serpent above. Wine is a traditional symbol of the blood shed by Christ, who will absolve humanity with his Crucifixion.’ John Gray was writing in the New Statesman, Sept 2017.

Sudoral

Sweat has no odour, provided you don’t allow it to come into contact with your skin, when it will interact with bacteria. Therein lies the problem: how to eliminate the bacteria or else deflect the sweat - produced by your three million-or-so sweat glands - away from the skin? Perhaps antiperspirant is a simpler solution.

Sudoral: of or relating to sweat.

Tamandua

The tamandua is a semi-arboreal, nocturnal South American anteater, partial to a few thousand ants or termites daily. They carry a defence spray four times stronger than a skunk’s. They have no teeth, relying instead on a powerful gizzard – a specialised stomach constructed of thick muscular walls for grinding up food. So they’re not uninteresting, but mostly I’m struck by how cute they are, considering they don’t make any appearances in children’s books, so far as I’ve seen. Tammy the Tamandua will be centre stage if I ever get around to writing for the pre-school years.

The genus Tamandua has two species: the southern tamandua (T. tetradactyla) and the northern tamandua (T. mexicana). Tammy, as illustrated, will be a southern tamandua.

Tchick

A verb so onomatopoeic its primary meaning in the OED is ‘to make a sound by pressing part of the tongue against the palate and withdrawing it with suction’, though such clucking is also ‘a command to urge on a horse’. Here’s the ultimate romantic horse-urging scenario: a bride riding a handsome grey along the beach (courtesy of Matthew Rycraft Wedding Photography: I’m sure my wife would have fancied such a bridal shot had the opportunity arisen).

Teg

Cornelia Baltes favours short words as the enigmatic titles of her paintings and – in the case of ‘Teg’, 2025 – prints. She brings a humorous angle to pop going minimal on the edge between figurative reduction and abstraction. It turns out, though I’m not sure it reads across to the image despite the similar colour scheme, that the nicely economical word ‘teg’ is a sheep in its second year - perhaps more commonly referred to as a hogget. The other image shows a Herdwick teg. Those age indicators also decide what sheep meat is called: up to 11 months it’s lamb; 11-24 months is hogget; over 24 months is mutton.

Sheep farming has its own vocabulary, of course. For example a slink is a very young lamb, whereas a gummer is a sheep so old that it has lost all of its teeth. A chilver is a female lamb. Tupping is mating. A wether is a castrated male – one which cannot tup. One that can leads to eaning: the act of a chilver giving birth. I also like greasy – a sheep shearer; raddle – coloured pigment used to mark sheep; and rooing – removing the fleece by hand-plucking.

'Teg' also led me to 'Tig' - see somewhat further on...

Tegestologist

Nothing to with the sheep above... This word, from the Latin ‘teges’, mat, is the term for collectors of beer mats. A humble hobby, I’d say, and there seem to be no tales comparable to say stamps or coins of high prices being paid for them. Like any collection, though, they can get numerous: the Austrian tegestologist Leo Pisker claims to have 150,000 different beer mats from 192 countries. Beer mats protect the table or bar on which they are placed by absorbing any condensation emanating from the glass. High quality beer mats are made of pulp board the best can absorb 300% of their own weight in moisture. That's not quite enough to lure me into the hobby, but I don’t drink much beer…

Theorbo

The visually striking theorbo is a lute with an extended neck (on which bass strings additional to those on a conventional lute are added) and a second pegbox (enabling it to be tuned by turning the pegs). Not the easiest instrument to take on the Underground, its repertoire comes primarily from the Baroque (c. 1600–1750), either to play basso continuo accompaniment parts or as a solo instrument.

Theophany

This alluring painting, which seems to deal in a language just out of reach, is ‘Theophany’, 2023, from Richard Kenton Webb’s ‘Manifesto of Painting’ series. Given that ‘theophany’ is ‘a visible manifestation to humankind of God’, it could be that what looks a little like streams of rain in this constructed landscape are more in the way of manna or something equally miraculous. The striking colour scheme can be read through Kenton’s personal ‘grammar of colour’, according to which ‘Yellow is about thought’, and ‘Green is about wisdom and teaching a philosophy of painting’. Perhaps what comes from above is, in this case, the creative impulse.

I regard theophony as a nice concept, but also a redundant one: as no gods exist, how can they manifest themselves? I wonder if there is a word for that? I'm tempted by the term 'c∅ncept', sneaking '∅', the philosophical notation for an empty set, into the category. Might 'perfection' and 'infinity' be other examples, albeit operating somewhat differently?

Thigmotropic

Are we compatibly thigmotropic? If I move to draw you into a kiss, will you melt into my arms - or pull away?

This couple certainly look to be on the engaged side of 'thigmotropism': the movement of an organism in response to a stimulus, in particular the habit of turning towards or away from a physical contact.

Thurification

I remember… Forty years ago you could walk into the office of a manager who smoked and hardly see for the thurification, not to mention the odour. I didn’t much mind, but I suppose I would now.

Thurification: to perfume by burning, most typically a shrine via a censer, but why not a quotidian room with smoke, in the days when that was allowed?

Tiddlypush

As ‘Thingummy’ is to objects, so the somewhat improbable ‘Tiddlypush’ is for people: a word substituted for the name of a person the speaker doesn’t know or has forgotten.

Tierce

'Tierce' is unusual among rare words in being one syllable carrying multiple meanings: a 35 gallon cask; a band of soldiers; a sequence of three playing cards of the same suit; a parrying position in fencing; an organ stop giving particular tones; a heraldic charge with a three-fold division.

Heraldry is a historic discipline with a rich vocabulary all of its own. The illustration shows the formations ‘tierced per pairle’, ‘tierced per pairle reversed’, ‘‘tierced per pale’ and ‘tierced per fesse’ in gules, argent and azure.

Tig

Attracted to ‘Teg’, as above, I wondered whether there is a complete vowel set of like words. ‘Tag’, ‘Tog’ (clothing) and ‘Tug’ aren’t in doubt, but what about ‘Tig’? It means ‘a light of playful touch’ – nice word. An image search, though, calls up welding gloves that hardly seem likely to facilitate that sort of tig. A second meaning is in play: TIG is the acronym for Tungsten Inert Gas, as used in welding. Yet it is feasible to effect a tig with TIG gloves, for they are designed to enable ‘the delicate tasks associated with precision welding’. The illustrated ESAB TIG gloves, for example, are said to ‘include premium-grade goatskin or sheepskin on the glove hand which is essential to maintaining fine dexterity while maximizing protection’. It would be harder to tig with MIG (Metal Inert Gas) welding gloves, as they need to be more robust and heat-resistant due to the higher temperatures involved.

Tiswas

On the one hand ‘tiswas’ is a state of anxiety, confusion or excitement, traceable to the 1930’s: the OED suggests that the word is a fanciful enlargement of ‘Tizz’. On the other hand, Tiswas was an ITV-produced British children’s TV series of 308 episodes running on Saturdays during 1974-82, the content of which might well leave participants ‘all of a tiswas’. Yet the title was said to be an acronym of ‘Today Is Saturday: Watch And Smile’. Coincidence? I suspect the acronym was tailored to fit the word.

TV's Tiswas saw the emergence of soon-to-be-well-known figures, such as Lenny Henry, Chris Tarrant and Jim Davidson. Popular features tended to be messy, stemming from the visits of the ‘Phantom Flan Flinger’ and the confinement of the child audience in a cage, where they were periodically doused in water. The photo shows ‘The Four Bucketeers’ - Chris Tarrant, Sally James, Bob Carolgees and John Gorman - in wetting action.

Tittynope

What meal is most likely to generate aesthetic tittynopes? Probably something posh on a plate rather than the after-card resulting from consumption of Pret a Manger's 'Classic Cheese Toastie' ('mature cheddar cheese, mozzarella & Italian cheese with spring onions and a dollop of our tangy English mustard mayo').

Tittynope: a small quantity of anything remaining - such as , following a meal, scraps that aren't quite enough to count as ‘left-overs’.

Trepid

A rather neatly unusual word, in that its negation - 'intrepid' - is very common, as is the noun form ‘trepidation’, but I’ve never seen the root word used: ‘trepid’ - fearful or apprehensive. Put it into an image search, though, and the top twenty results are all of staircases. Are people more frightened of falling down stairs than of the many other traumas that might afflict them? No, it turns out that ‘trepid’ is the Estonian for ‘stairs’. Those results come from Estonian companies who make rather attractive wooden flights, perfect for a tumble.

Triskelion / Triskeles / Vexillology

Two flags of islands feature a triskelion, or triskeles, of three bent legs joined together at a central point. It derives from the triple spiral used by many ancient civilisations, the swastika being another form. The term comes from its Ancient Greek origins - 'triskelḗs' means ‘three-legged’. The association with Sicily goes back to the 4th century: the flag combines it with the head of Medusa and three wheat ears, representing the fertility of the land. The triskeles is said to represent the three capes of the island - Pelorus, Pachynus and Lilybæum - and the colours the regions of Palermo (red) and Corleone (yellow). The Isle of Man’s triskeles became the local flag in 1313, but it was standardised only in 1966 - armoured but sparser, and with curiously similar colouring. It’s worth flagging up in passing, to make another triple, that ‘vexillology’ is the study of flags.

With slight artistic license, I have edited the Manx flag into the Sicilian shape.

Tsavorite

Not only had I not heard of Tsavolite, I was shamefully ignorant of the various types of garnet illustrated below, providing a whole litany of new words. Tsavolite, discovered in Kenya and Tanzania only in 1967, is named in honour of Tsavo East National Park.

Tsavorite is a variety of the garnet group species grossular, a calcium-aluminium garnet with the formula Ca₃Al₂(SiO₄)₃.That’s named after the gooseberry, botanically grossularia, as several types have a green coloration, provided in tsavolite by trace amounts of vanadium or chromium.

Tuzzy-muzzy

Is this O’Keeffe’s tuzzy-muzzy? Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) vehemently denied any vulval / vaginal intent in such works as The Blue Flower, 1918. Yet few have accepted that, leading to her co-option to Freudian and feminist causes alike. Randall Griffin, in Phaidon’s book on her, suggests that ‘O'Keeffe's aim was to distinguish herself from her contemporary male artists by producing paintings that would seem both audaciously sexual and innately feminine’. Moreover, Lisa L. Moore has argued that her flowers should be seen as part of a lesbian tradition, since evidence suggests that O'Keeffe had several affairs with women. So perhaps 'tuzzy-muzzy' is the word for what she paints. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘1. A bunch of flowers’ and ‘2. The female genitals’.

Ubiety

The condition of being in a definite place. One might suggest that Roger Federer enjoyed the ubiety when on Wimbledon’s Centre Court, having won a record eight singles titles there (in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012 and 2017). The image is from the last of those.

Ubiquarian

The fifty years from 1970 might prove to an unrepeatable golden age for ubiquarians: people who go everywhere. That was the era of affordable worldwide air travel. Previously it was too expensive to be available to more than a few, afterwards it may be that – even once the effects of the pandemic have worked through – long-term cost issues and global warming concerns return us to the times when only the rich can travel extensively.

Nor is that the only interesting variant on the Latin roots of ubi (place) and ubique (everywhere). There's also ubriction (the condition of being in a certain place), ubicity (whereabouts), Ubiquitism (the doctrine of the omnipresence of Christ's body) and...

Ubiquious

It’s hardly here, there and everywhere - it’s not even a common spelling mistake. Yet ‘ubiquious’ is listed by the OED as a valid alternate spelling of the more ubiquitous ‘ubiquitous’.

That, as Beatles fanatics will presumably know, is the 1967 Portuguese issue on Parlophone of the 7” Vinyl, 7" 45 RPM EP in Mono. The love song, written by Paul in 1965 with Jane Asher in mind, was cited by Lennon in 1980 as his favourite by McCartney.

Ump

Not so many abbreviations are honoured in the Oxford English Dictionary, but both ‘ump’ and ‘umps’ are listed as proper words for an umpire, especially in baseball. That leaves two questions… Why don’t cricketers ever refer to ‘the ump’, the more so when ‘ref’ (also in the OED) is a frequent abbreviation for the referee in British football parlance? And when a decision goes against them, are baseball players said to get the ‘ump with the ump’? Actually a third question now occurs to me: why do some sports have umps, and others refs? What’s the diff?

Ultracrepidarian

For some reason – perhaps I look a bit too ‘normal’, appearances can be deceptive – wherever I go in the world I tend to be asked for directions. Surprisingly often, the answer is as simple as ‘you’re there already’ or ‘the railway station is that way’, but when you don’t know, there is the slight temptation to look good and earn gratitude by making something up: after all, there’s no come-back and you might be right anyway. That would be the ultracrepidarian approach in one of its purer but less common settings.

Ultracrepidarian: a person who offers opinions that extend beyond their knowledge.

Underyawn

I would define this as ‘a wide space beneath an overhead structure or feature’, i.e. a yawning absence below, the opposite of an overhang. That seems straightforward enough, and it’s a nice word. Yet despite appearing in Edward Thomas’s fairly well-known 1915 poem ‘The Path’, it hasn’t yet made the Oxford English Dictionary:

…the eye
Has but the road, the wood that overhangs
And underyawns it, and the path that looks
As if it led on…

Did Thomas invent the word? Some kudos to him if did, the more so as his reputation is for reanimating common words rather than coining neologisms, for using words that, as in his rhymed free verse ‘Words’, are ‘light as dreams, / Tough as oak, / Precious as gold, / As poppies and corn, / Or an old cloak… / Strange and sweet, / Equally, / And familiar, / To the eye…’

The road in ‘The Path’ was Stoner Hill Road, a regular passage of Thomas’s, and the main route between Petersfield and Alton in Hampshire. The photograph above was taken from that road.

Uranophobia

Does this picture scare you? There are so many obscure phobias we ought to have one in this list... Uranophobia is the fear of Heaven, derived from the Greek for heaven, Uranos. That would seem on the face of it to be one of the least rational phobias, right up there with fear of pleasure (hedonophobia) or happiness (cherophobia) – though I suppose anything is worrying if you have phobophobia (fear of phobias). Stigiophobia (fear of Hell) seems much more on point – sufficiently so that I’m glad I don’t believe in the afterlife either way.

Vamplate

One of those things one would have suspected there was a word for had one thought about it, and another illustration of just how much dictionary content can be traced to military history – see below and also 'aventail', 'guisarme' and 'tierce'. Could be handy for metaphorical use, were anyone going to understand you.

Vamplate: conical hand defence affixed to a lance. This doubly-depicted 16^th century Italian steel example is in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. It's part of an unusually large armour garniture for the tilt - a tournament fought on horseback between two opponents armed with lances and separated by a lengthwise barrier. The full set includes helmet and vambraces (arm defences), buffe (chin defence), second breastplate, manifer (reinforced left gauntlet), trellised targe (shield), reinforce covering the left half of the torso and left shoulder (mezzo sovrapetto) and a larger elbow defense (soprabracciale). The decoration consisting of etched bands containing trophies of arms and musical instruments was a popular design at the time.

Vandyke

‘Vandyke’ is available as either a noun, describing the type of beard-moustache hybrid typically seen in paintings by the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), or as a verb, meaning to take a zig-zag course consistent with the ins and outs of such elaborate facial hair. As such, it is surely the ideal name for a Belgian detective, who wears a Vandyke beard - both a moustache and a goatee with all hair on the cheeks shaved - and follows convoluted cases wherever they take him as he wends his way to a solution. There is, in contrast, no link between the name ‘Hercule Poirot’, his spectacular waxed moustache and his manner of solving crimes. The name and facial hair could be improved...

In his ‘Self-Portrait with a Sunflower’ (1633), van Dyck points to himself while holding up for display the gold chain recently presented to him by his patron, Charles I; with the other he gestures toward a large sunflower: Van Dyck represents himself as the ideal courtier, whose devotion to his monarch is likened to the flower’s natural inclination to follow the path of the sun… There have been different Anglicised spellings of Antoon van Dyck over the years, and it’s the one with an ‘e’ which has entered the lexicon.

Varanian

Monitor lizards have interesting qualities, perhaps most evident in the biggest of them, the komodo dragon. They never blink, of course; can reproduce asexually; and can eat 80% of their body weight in one sitting. What distinguishes them most, though, is a fast metabolism and high aerobic capacity, more like the typical mammal than the typical reptile. That explains their muscularity, which also enables them to run at 12 mph for surprising distances, given their somewhat lumbering build.

Varanian: characteristic of monitor lizards, the genus Varanidae

Volvelle

A volvelle is a paper construction with rotating parts, and may operate either for display purposes (e.g. to scroll through a phrase, or to display alternating images) or to demonsrate or calculate cycles, such as the movement of the planets – such wheel charts are often found in medieval astronomy books. One can go so far as to call them analogue predecessors of the computer. The word comes from the Latin volvere, ‘to turn’.

Wabbit

There’s nothing leporine about this word, a Scots term for ‘exhausted or somewhat unwell’. But that’s a tempting Loony Tunes picture…

Wamus

She’s wearing one: a belted jacket in cardigan-style. Will the wamus warm us, too?

Warding

Who’d have thought that so many specialist terms were applicable to a simple key? The one that strikes me as a word not seen in other contexts is ‘warding’ as a noun. My source, The Art of Lock Picking, sounds dubious - though it does advise, who knows how sincerely, ‘Only pick locks that you personally own or have explicit permission from the owner to pick’, making it sound like a hobby akin to solving Rubik's Cube. The guide explains that ‘the lock's warding is essentially the shape or formation of the keyway, and this shape protrudes through the entirety of the lock. Keys are manufactured to fit their lock's exact warding shape.’ The word ‘ward’ seems to be commoner in this context, e.g. the Encyclopaedia Britannica states that ‘The Romans invented wards - i.e. Projections around the keyhole, inside the lock, which prevent the key from being rotated unless the flat face of the key (its bit) has slots cut in it in such a fashion that the projections pass through the slots.’ But ‘ward’ is a very common noun, and one with copious uses – the OED gives 18 different meanings for it!

Whelve

Whelve is an interesting word since its old English origins have it meaning to turn (as a dish or vessel) upside down usually to cover something, and more modern definitions have it meaning to bury deeply or hide something. The meanings relate to each other, since both end up hiding something.

The illustration is from the 1820 book of children’s verses ‘The World turned upside down’, printed in York by James Kendrew:

‘Here you may see what's very rare,
The world turn'd upside down;
A tree and castle in the air,
A man walk on his crown.'

This is the frontispiece: most of the illustrations show animals engaging in human activities.

Warrigal

What was I saying, that warrigals couldn’t drag me away? Well, maybe these could, provided that they moved on from each other.

‘Warrigal’ is an Australian term for a wild or untamed horse.

Yarborough

This a bridge term: a thirteen card hand with no card higher than nine. Not so helpful to receive, but how likely is that? The numbers are impressive, driven by the starting point in the apparently straightforward business arranging a single deck of 52 cards. The factorial of 52, written as ‘52!, comes from starting with all the cards in one pile, randomly select one cards to be in position 1, one of the remaining 51 to be in position 2 and so on. Hence, the possible arrangements are 52 * 51 * 50 * ... * 3 * 2 * 1. That comes out at 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 - a big enough number that, if you counted it out at one second intervals, it would take you some three billion years. Matters get more manageable if restricted to possible hands of bridge (i.e. combinations of 13 cards from the 52 card pack). The formula for that is 52! / 3! (52-13) ! that leads to 635,013,559,600 possible hands, of which 347,373,600 are yarboroughs. So your chances of a yarborough are 635,013,559,600 / 347,373,600, or one in 1,828. It won’t happen too often, but I guess a regular player is likely to get a yarborough at some point. Not so some possibilities. There are, to take the contrasting example, only four possible hands with the maximum of 37 points (the four aces, four kings, four queens and one of the four jacks). So the chance getting one is 635,013,559,600 / 4, or 1 in 158,753,389,900. Don’t bet on it!

There is also a village of Yarborough in Lincolnshire. I haven’t been there, but imagine that the roads are all very short, no house being numbered higher than nine.

Yelm

Yelm: a bundle of combed straw for thatching. There are some 35,000 thatched properties in England, just 0.15% of the 25m dwellings. So having one makes you agreeably distinctive, and perhaps there should be more. Fire is no more likely than with other roofs if the right care is taken. That aside there are pro and cons:

Pro: Water reed, the most durable thatch, has a lifespan of 55 to 65 years; thatch is naturally insulating, so it will keep your house cool in summer and warm in winter; thatch is environmentally-friendly and sustainable; it can be shaped into soft forms not likely to be available in other roofing materials: it is light and doesn’t need the heavy support structures that other roofing materials require, so reducing building costs.

Con: installing thatch is labour intensive, and so expensive; it needs an annual professional inspection to check its condition; regular maintenance is essential, else leaks may occur; safety precautions are required - you need to cut down overhanging branches so that the thatch doesn’t hold onto moisture, install a lightning rod to disperse lightning strikes and a spark resistor for your chimney, and apply treatments to deter pests.

Yuzu

How pleasant to be gifted a word, as when a friend supplied a jar from her own production of yuzu marmalade. That led me to check on the origin of the fruit. The notably aromatic yuzu (Citrus junos) is believed to have originated in central China as a hybrid of the mangshanyeju subspecies of mandarin orange (left above) and the ichang papeda (right above). Though rarely eaten as a fruit, yuzu is a common ingredient in Japanese cuisine, where the aromatic zest and the juice are used much in the same way that lemons are used elsewhere. And it proves perfect for marmalade.

I think of marmalade as the archetypal breakfast item, although it had a long history before its 19th century adoption in Scotland - and then the rest of Britain - as a breakfast spread. One could add, moreover, that the classic marmalade – essentially a citrus jelly with peel retained – seems to be dropping out of fashion: one rarely sees it in Europe, but even here it isn’t rare these days to find only non-citrus jams offered to spread on the toast in hotel breakfast buffets.

Zabra

A zabra is not necessarily a typo (or ‘mis-stripe-o’!?): for ‘zebra’: it may refer genuinely to a midsized Iberian sailing vessel used to carry goods by sea in the 13th-16th centuries. My image, though it is a boat, is a visual typo of sorts, as it is a Zebra. Not Equus quagga , but a boat of that name, created by Parisian industrial designer and engineer Dimitri Bez. Its main selling points are the minimalist style and an electric motor, making it environmentally friendly compared with other powered boats, and attractively quiet. I guess the zabra was also quiet and non-polluting, so perhaps we haven’t made so much progress.

A GULP OF MAGPIES

2026-09-05T01:31:37.080-07:00

Knowing that magpies

can be black and white

or white and black

doesn't help in telling which this is.

The oystercatcher

by way of contrast

isn’t black and white, or white and black:

it’s orange!

The oystercatcher isn't a type of magpie, but the visual similarities have led to comparisons and some languages build that in. The Welsh term 'Pioden fôr', for example, translates to 'magpie of the sea'.

Magpies’ love of shiny things

used to be a popular excuse

for the hastily-flung-away ring.

Now we know they’re neophobic.

A systematic study was carried out by Exeter University scientists in 2014. It refuted the folklore myth of the ‘thieving magpie’ by showing that they are actually nervous of objects such as jewellery. Lead author Dr Toni Shephard said: ‘We did not find evidence of an unconditional attraction to shiny objects in magpies. Instead, all objects prompted responses indicating neophobia – fear of new things.’ The image is from Jane Daniell’s set of four etchings ‘The Thieving Magpie’, 2015, based on the Rossini’s 1817 opera semiseria of the same name.

There are twice as many magpies now

as in 1970, but less than half the sparrows.

Yet, still, there are more sparrows.

Yet, still, I see more magpies.

Magpies: 0.6m in 1970, 1.2m now. House sparrows: 25m in 1970, 10m now. The wren, at 22m, is currently our commonest bird.

Spot what difference?

Males are 10% bigger

than females

and are slightly-more-than-correspondingly longer in the aerodynamic tail.

Cutting to the Chase

One for sorrow, Two for joy

Five for silver, Six for gold

Ten for the Devil himself.

There are various versions of the nursery rhyme referring to superstitions about the portent of the number of magpies seen together in a flock. The text is extracted from this one:

‘One for sorrow, Two for joy, Three for a girl and Four for a boy, Five for silver, Six for gold, Seven for a secret never to be told, Eight for Heaven, Nine for Hell, Ten for the Devil himself’

Having said all which, I almost always see just a solitary magpie. Confirming, I suppose, the current sorry state of the world.

Hush for Lisa…

Counting Crows

has seven members.

So what’s the secret never to be told?

The seven-strong Californian band Counting Crows has sold over 20 million albums since its formation in 1991. I don’t claim to be a fan, but how many corvid-counting rockers are there? As for ‘Seven for a secret never to be told’… Lead singer Adam Duritz has dated both Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox – so perhaps his relationship with Lisa Kudrow is the secret, meaning he has completed the full set of female Friends. The band’s most appealing non-secret is that they were termed ‘Accounting Crows’ after securing a particularly good recording contract in their early-nineties peak.

The intelligent magpie

is one of the few non-mammalian species

able to recognize itself in a mirror test –

and here’s my proof.

They start in December

and they start with a mud cup to anchor the sticks to come

into the fork of a tree.

I did say they’re clever.

I reckon you’d need

all these eggs

to make a decent magpie omelette.

It would taste a little wild.

Magpie eggs are edible, but contain only a third of the volume of a standard hen’s egg.

And this is Murgatroyd

mascot of Blue Peter’s rival -

a pie made of mag-

azine snippets of a televisual sort.

The British children's television programme ‘Magpie’ ran on ITV from 1968-80 as a rival to the BBC's famous 'Blue Peter'. I have no recollection of seeing it, or Murgatroyd – a rather free-form magpie, I have to say. I do remember ‘Blue Peter’, which started – like me - in 1958, and is still running.

Here’s a magpie

further off than I might have liked.

Is Catkin really

so very scary?

Look carefully! The magpie is on the second-highest pair of wires. The photo shows The Land on which my wife Steph keeps her pony. Catkin is the yard cat.

Magpies may be crows of a sort

but they don’t make a murder:

a tribe more likely, a mischief, a parliament,

a tidings or maybe - which I’m opting for - a gulp.

NON-HOLIDAY IN HOSPITAL

2026-09-02T02:03:23.171-07:00

Non-Holiday in Hospital

Written 21 - 24 Aug 2026 - Acute Oncology Ward, and 25 Aug - 1 Sept 2026, Oncology Ward D12, Southampton General Hospital.

I felt able to classify my 16 – 21 July stay as as a 'Holiday in Hospital'. Less so this time: I was more like a writer in residence!

There could be some karma

in using a gut health product’s pot

as a spittoon

for my regurgitatations.

As carried in the car on the way in to hospital on 21 August. Repeated regurgitation of bilsih vomit proved to be the key to doctors deducing the latest development in my Stage 4 Bowel Cancer. A tumour had blocked off the path from my stomach to my digestive system. My medical notes state 'he presented to hospital with worsening back and abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting and a history of delayed bowel movement for three days prior to presentation. Vomitus contained undigested food.'

Six times a day

then no poo for seventy hours!

Even as a boy I wasn’t thrilled

by roller coasters.

The three poo-free days had preceded my admission to hospital, after which an enema released a matching seven on the 22nd.

Acute Oncology

is on Level C. No reason not,

but did it have to be

quite such a big C?

Corridor signage

Who knows

why they fed a tube

in up my nose?

I only know I didn’t like it!

I was told that the main purpose was nasal feeding, rather than – as I had first thought – to extract vomit or bile directly from the stomach via the tube – then told later that nasal extraction was indeed the purpose! Either way, the insertion of a tube, as I recalled clearly from 2022, is an unpleasant process. Don't put me on the volunteer list of people on whom students practice their technique!

The infusion pump beeps

to say there is 15 minutes to go

before it beeps to say it's done -

to tell me at two I’ll be woken again at quarter past!

The monitor for the infusion drip above my bed, keeping me hydrated on consecutive six hour cycles. I soon learned that if woken by the bleeping at 01.45 there was no point in trying to sleep gain until the cycle finished at 02.00.

It's lucky I'm not a gourmand

as I haven't been fed for three days.

Still,

even non-gourmands get hungry!

The hospital menu is actually pretty good, the more so compared with nothing...

The pain some people

endure in here!

Fancy me allowing a modest backache

to keep me awake…

In the ward the patients come and go

without much talk of Michelangelo.

Come day three,

I’m the veteran of Acute Oncology.

‘In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.’ T.S. Eliot: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 1915. The image is of my water jug.

Ah, the clink of china!

Yet it’s hard to look

forward to breakfast

when you won’t be getting any.

The butterfly needle

is my friend as,

compared with the bigger cannula needle,

it does not sting much like a bee.

Muhammad Ali first explained his style in his most famous way in 1964:’Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, his hands can't hit what his eyes can't see’.

Modernity is here!

I find myself assuming

that the medical procedures

will follow suit.

At 02.15 on 24 August I was transferred from the old-style Acute Oncology ward to a more general oncology ward set in a plush new 4th floor extension – the same ward in which I took my ‘Holiday in Hospital' in July (but not in my own isolation room, despite my pointing it out as mine on arrival).

Suppose that, on death

my memories pass into another body.

Would I

still be no more?

What if that other body

remembers more than I do?

Would that mean

that I’d be more alive than now?

Cannula coverage for daywear

And if I knew that other body

was going to suffer

some horrible harm,

would it be for me to worry?

Cannula coverage to take a shower

I’m hungry enough

after five days of not eating

not to be keen on the doctor’s assurance

that up to two weeks is no problem.

It might look like a car park

from the outside, to you:

to me, though,

it’s a view.

The view being from the quieter non-acute oncology ward to which I was moved. Not many wards have a view out.

This is the time to park!

You don’t even have

to pretend to be disabled.

Yet no one takes advantage…

This morning’s carousel contains

a record line-up of infusions to come.

The fun never stops!

Except for when it will…

Now they want to measure

my urine production

as well as my blood pressure,

temperature, and aspirated products.

You'll have to trust me: those cardboard tubes contains my wee

When I sense my main tumour

through the pain in my back,

my own sense of tumour

comes under a small attack.

Ribbons on Emily's uniform

Here’s a quirk to contemplate

I used to be woken twice a night by 'hunger pang' sensations.

Now I’m not – although

I haven’t eaten for a week.

I do have a constant grumble of emptiness, but it doesn’t seem enough to wake me. That’s little loss, though: back pain, blood pressure readings, medication times, bleeping infusers and general ward noise have stepped into the role.

When I run short

of fortitude

the slack’s picked up

by having zero choice.

Following aspiration of stomach contents with a vacuum pump

Goodbye chicken curry, liquorice

coffee, blackcurrants and cauliflower curds!

I’m sorry not to say farewell through taste,

rather than through words.

I was nil by mouth for the week prior to being told that a permanent jejunostomy was likely to be needed: I would never eat or drink again, just receive everything through a stomach tube. That genuine list of eccentric favourites touches on the fact that curds are the dense, edible white head of the cauliflower plant, which actually consist of a massive cluster of immature, undeveloped flower buds and thick stem tissue. Not that I refer the ‘curds’ all that often when I don’t fancy a rhyme! In fact, the day after I had written this - the worst news I had yet received - the diagnosis moved on: a non-tube solution was possible after all.

Liane tells me ‘jejune’ was a cool word in the sixties

(What would she know? She was an unborn German)

so a jejunostomy must be a cool op.

Thanks for trying, Liane!

Artist Liane Lang visited, leading me to break the privacy rule of not showing other people in these photos...I'm still not showing NHS staff so fully without agreement, or other patients at all.

Eight days of taking nothing in

has seen me drop by just eight pounds.

Dieting must be pretty hard

when it's done with food!

From 74.5 Kg (11 st 8 lbs) on admission to 70.5 kilos (11 st 0 lbs) on 26 Aug. Nurse Kim has an impressive collection of pens but shows no sign of using them to note my weight. Indeed, I was surprised that that among the battery of regular tests and measurements (temperature, blood pressure, pulse, blood sugar levels, blood make-up, oxygen levels, urine flow etc) I was not weighed at all. I only have the data because, curious about it, I asked to be weighed.

That said, Steph likes me

to be eleven stone dead.

I don’t think she said

‘Eleven stone, dead’.

Bench halfway down the corridor to D12.

Is this bed lying here

illegitimately? Perhaps it’s just resting.

Who can expect even a bed

to be absolute give and no take?

According to the blue corridor notice shown here, which maybe should have been bigger, 'BEDS & TROLLEYS MUST NOT BE LEFT IN THIS AREA'

The chicken pie, vegetable lasagne

and macaroni cheese are all off today!

I take the disaster calmly,

having been ineligible for any of them…

I'm not yet sure what the hospital veggie lasagne looks like, but in my current starved fantasy, something like this online depiction...

Prince is from Ghana

He asks me about British politics.

I explain that Nigel Farage

doesn't want him to help me get better.

If you took immigrants and foreign workers out of the NHS, the system would be unviable.

1.30 a.m. is the time to write this

while the back pain’s back to keep me awake

but I haven’t got through the four hours required

before another Oramorph.

Oramorph is a brand name for morphine sulphate oral solution, a fast-acting liquid opioid painkiller served in a disposable purple syringe. It deals with my back pain (caused by tumour pressure) in about twenty minutes, then I can get to sleep again. My prescription allows it only every four hours.

Karen knocks over the urine container

I’d put in a stupid place.

Ah, the glamorous side of nursing!

Yet she still smiles...

I am still collecting urine for measurement - the aim to check that inputs from the constant drips are in balance with the flows out.

Will I recognise the time

when I’ve become ‘the deadest thing

alive enough to have strength to die’

and know what I should say?

Thomas Hardy: 'Neutral Tones', 1867: ‘The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing / Alive enough to have strength to die’. That's a night view with Sean's light on under the curtain next door.

Pleased as I am for them

it doesn’t help much after ten days nil by mouth

to hear the other patients praise

the unexpectedly good catering.

Who knew that GOO

stood for a ‘gastric outlet obstruction’,

here 'in the setting of metastatic colorectal carcinoma’.

I already have the T-shirt!

Those quotes are from my medical record. Sonic Youth’s album ‘GOO’ (1990) is a favourite of mine. The title refers to one of the songs – ‘My friend Goo’ which I took to be a play on yucky stuff and God and good as well as referring to lyric writer Kim Gordon’s cool-sounding friend. The surgical interpretation had not occurred to me! The cover features artwork by Raymond Pettibon, and I have owned a T-shirt version of that for years – the photo shows me in 2024, when it seemed neat to wear a 'Sonic Youth' T-shirt to the opening of my 'Advanced Contemporaries' exhibition of artists over 60. I still have the (bypassed) obstruction, so now I can be GOO both inside and out!

I can't die yet

Not until I've written enough poems about death

to make people see

that they're all about life.

Written three hours pre-op on 28 Aug 2026. There’s always the chance with a total anaesthetic that you won’t come round afterwards. Only later did it occur to me that I might already have written enough such poems, making it a risky argument!

What to do when awaiting surgery?

I search online for what may be my last new word:

the patslide is ‘a smooth, rigid plastic board or sheet

used to transfer patients safely between a bed and a trolley’.

The view is from the holding room just before the operation. When the surgeon arrived I was given - for the first time - a choice of stent placements: a safe, well-established but temporary measure; or a newer longer-lasting solution with a 10% chance of life-threatening complications. Both would allow eating in the usual way, if not with normal food – a big improvement on the stomach tube that follow a jejunostomy. I took the 10% risk.

I was still wondering

as the anaesthetist went through

his well-tried routine of jokey distractions,

just what percentage might have swayed me?

So, I have a lumen-apposing metal stent

inserted between stomach and bowel,

the better to bypass a tumour blockage,

I believe this is good news.

That's the diagram in the gastroenterologist's notes through which he described my choice of options, but with my colour additions. I had arrived in theatre believing there were three options, as confirmed by the oncology team the day before: bypass surgery, a stent cutting through the blockage, or a stomach tube. Not at all, said Dr Tehami now, there were only two: a stent (red outline in the diagram) through the obstruction (blue) or a separately-placed lumen-apposing metal stent (LAMS - green) by cutting a path between stomach and jejunum. That latter was my choice: an Endoscopic Ultrasound guided gastrojejunostomy.

On the other hand, ‘Rats!’

Just when I’d spent long enough online

to bore my acquaintance with the ins and outs of a jejunostomy,

I find I’ve merely added to my stock of pointless knowledge.

Diagram online of how a jejunostomy would have worked.

‘Quite a day’

Steph texts me, ‘for a body!’ -

pretending to mistype

her playful coding of me as ‘a boy’.

Typing also goes on in the ward, too: Mandy's on admin.

One bound - well, maybe later…

One stagger to the loo and I’m free!

A night without tubes,

and I’m allowed a mug of tea!

‘How do you cope’

asks Peter in Bed 4,

‘two weeks without food?’

‘I let my shorts fall down’.

I wish to complain

that I’ve nothing to complain about.

Where’s the provocation fun in that?

Even the food looks as if it’s going to be good.

Leaflets on the ward

Small puzzles of the world

No. 8,484.

Why do NHS shower curtains

not reach to the floor?

The consequence is that you have to be very careful where to stack your clothes. Hang on a mo, perhaps that's a complaint. It looks to me as if the designated puzzle number refers to both the rhyming slang / bingo call ‘84, curtains door’ and the commonest standard length of curtains, 84 inches.

Anaesthetists

like their cannulas big and branched.

I’m told this is an ‘octopus’ style –

though it looks no more than troctopus to me.

Lunch has arrived!

I am extremely pleased,

even if

it won’t look much to you.

By Day 10 of nil-by-mouth I was down to 69.4 Kg / 10 st 9 lbs, but then a liquid menu was introduced - clear soup and jelly or yoghurt.

Looks like I was given an EEG while under

The sticker is hard to pull off from the hairs,

but I tell myself to man up in empathy

for all that women tolerate by wax!

It can seem that Steph thinks

she knows better than the nurses what is good for me.

My instinct’s to resist that,

only she's probably right.

I see I may be

‘overwhelmed by thoughts’.

Yes please,

bring them on!

'From the moment you're diagnosed, you may be overwhelmed by the amount of thoughts and questions you have about cancer' - Macmillan Cancer Support Leaflet: ‘Why me? What now? Who can help?’, as stocked in the ward. It lies on my rather stylish 'summer dressing gown', given to me three years by a friend whose own husband succumbed to cancer before he got to use it. Thank you, Helen - it has done me considerable service!

I have progressed to the puréed menu!

Better than a stomach pump,

yet ‘tempting’ would be to go too far:

even the photographs are unappetising.

Not yet enough to stop my weight falling further - to 68 k / 10 st 5 lb by Sun 30 Aug

This I like!

Were I stronger I’d be inclined

to make a fake-slip-down

in the banana’s honour.

Walking out to the main hospital concourse to get a paper

There is no pain I am receiving -

Oramorph has got my back -

and no obvious reason I should be receding

quicker than the tumours do their stuff.

Now that the stent links the stomach to the duodenum, the medical emphasis switches back to my wider collection of tumours: their growth or spread will be what determines how soon I die – that’s the only obvious reason ‘I should be receding’. Except this quatrain started when the words of Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’ came to me wrongly, as per the title. ‘There is no pain, you are receding’ is correct. Appropriately enough, the song does refer, literally, to numbness caused by an overdose of tranquillisers - albeit the more metaphorical anatomisation of societal numbness is its point in the structure of ‘The Wall’ (1979).

Come the 32nd

anniversaries could get too predictable.

I know! Let's have one

in hospital!

27 August was the date. Cards remained at my bedside.

This won’t stay this neat for long

but I claim it’s not my fault:

Hospital blankets tend to fall off

because they are designed that way.

Hospital blankets are made from smooth, lightweight, and low-friction cotton / synthetic weaves. They feature small holes that trap warm body air inside the fibres to balance thermal retention with comfort across varying room temperatures and patient conditions., and are also designed to withstand frequent industrial laundering. But they slip easily if not tucked in with oppressive 'hospital corner' tightness.

At first I thought

the yellow pointer meant

the only way was up…

but maybe not?

Technology changes

at furious speed.

All the same, I'm sceptical.

How exactly is this going to fly?

That’s a bit of a tease. I understand the Air Ambulance van’s main functions to be providing backup when the helicopter is grounded (it carries the same kit), assisting with post-landing transport and taking part in community outreach events.

Rob says he’s bored silly

as ‘you can’t do nothing here’.

Should I be feeling guilty

about struggling to get everything done?

Rob was opposite me - most of the time in D12 the other three beds in my room were occupied by the friendly Rob, Sean and Peter. My hospital plan is appended at the end!

Henry’s an experienced maker of beds

He must have passed

the 100,000 mark.

I expect to be impressed!

Henry has been working in the same support role here for 25 years, and estimates he makes 18 beds per day. A working year contains some 230 days, so 25 x 230 x 18 = some 103,500 beds before mine. Hooray for Henry's!

Was it Keats who claimed

that truth was beauty

and beauty truth?

Well, we've got the truth…

It was Keats – no prizes for that! ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ – ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 1819

What might seem the most basic act

is getting rather complicated:

colour and volume must now be monitored,

as well as time, and frequency, and score on the Bristol Scale.

I reckon I’d need twenty lines

to set out all the future constraints

of my stent-and-cancer-adjusted diet.

Let’s stick with one: eat nothing that expands in the stomach.

The biggest impact of that dictate is: never again can I eat bread or bread products. The image shows dietician Zoë's breezily direct intervention in the standard booklet advising on 'Eating After a Duodenal Stent'

Let’s hope that Auden

and all who’ve gone already

to where they can’t be fed

will be OK with metaphorical bread.

W.H. Auden: ‘Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead’: ‘Secondary Worlds’, 1968

Why should I be mortified

that I might soon be mort?

If I went completely French,

it couldn’t make much difference.

Triggered by a message from the artist Judith Burrows, who declared herself ‘mortified (forgive the pun)’ that she hadn’t replied to my email about ‘The Death Suite’ . The image is a Lithographic print made from her oil painting 'Lone Man Waiting (for someone or perhaps time)'. The word ‘mortify’ derives from the Latin ‘mortificare’ (to kill), which passed into Anglo-Norman as ‘mortifier’ (to cause to die) – consistent with the French word for death itself, ‘la mort’. 'Mort' is a English word, too, most relevantly for the note played on a hunting horn to announce that a deer has been killed.

Fear not!

This is the way out of the hospital,

not the exit that being here

was seeking to prevent.

Photo taken on the way to the discharge room, 1 September

Thanks / Notes

My wonderful wife, Steph, visited daily, hence several mentions.

Many thanks to all the NHS staff, who collectively sorted me, and were were always helpful and cheerful. They also answered my not infrequent questions about what was going on - practical and medical, but also as driven more by what I was writing!

Thanks also to my 'art network'. I was grateful to those who took the trouble to send me hundreds of personalised messages of love and support (but I decided I couldn't add individual replies to all into the plan below!).

Hospital is a time-rich environment: no need to clean or cook (or even eat, in my case), water the garden, do the bins, iron, hoover etc. You can't play sport or go out on trips. Sleep is difficult, leaving more hours awake. And for some reason, I didn’t feel like playing online chess: another hour per day saved! So if you’re feeling OK – and, much of the time, I was – it’s worth planning to make the most of it. Which I did by monitoring myself against the following, assuming a two week stay was likely (in fact, it was only twelve days. It felt longer!). Yes, I am a bit nuts, but people are used to it...

PLAN FOR ESTIMATED TWO WEEK HOSPITAL STAY Yes or No

SAFE TO ASSUME WILL HAPPEN

Medical visits, tests, monitoring, procedures Y

Daily visits and discussions with Steph Y

Family visits Y

ESSENTIAL

Understand what doctors are saying, as assisted by Steph, devise questions

ahead of meetings, and maintain medical records and notes Y

Pre-plan future changes to recording in response to developments Y

Deal with family comms Y

Phone Mum daily Y

Celebrate 32^nd Wedding Anniversary Y

DO IF POSSIBLE

Daft and implement activity plan Y

Maintain Instagram presence Y

Write and publish 2 x weekly FAD columns Y

Photos and texts for photo-poems covering the period Y

Set up artist visitors Y

Produce autobiographical article material in collaboration with Emma Y

Take forward ‘Holes, positive’ show 50%

Respond to Bella re APT show N

NICE TO DO

Read daily paper, TLS, LRB 50%

Watch 1 x 'Nashville' TV episode daily Y

Watch 'Match of the Day' programmes Y

Expand musical range Y

Complete reading of James Schuyler biography in tandem with Collected Poems Y

New York School wider poetry reading 25%

Read Knausgaard novel 100 / 660 pages

Proper consideration of Allen Jones's art via Mark Hudson’s book ‘Moves’ N