My feet are not a pretty sight. I have a pronounced bunion (/bˈʌnɪən/) on the right and a littler one on the left. They sort of crept up on me when I noticed a kind of hump on adjacent toes. ”Oh, that’s a hammer toe,” said my friendly physician, who sent me off to an orthopaedic surgeon, who sent me off for X-rays and who eventually moulded my feet in plaster of Paris for custom orthotics that I have worn ever since.

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This time of year, approximately speaking, is ripe for investigating food and cultures, as in the episode Celebrating Passover and Easter. With Passover just behind and Easter just ahead, I’m happy to resurrect some more ancient posts.

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My own personal Wayback Machine recently reminded me that as the first Covid lockdown got under way I was forced to address some prominent myths about sourbread baking being promulgated.

All well and good. A columnist for hire must occasionally promulgate timely myths if they are to earn a cru...

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An excellent In Our Time episode on Sir John Soane brought me up short. Guests talked about Joseph Gandy, a talented draughtsman and artist who worked closely with Soane to turn Soane’s architectural drawings into realistic depictions. Gandy and Soane both had a taste for the aesthetics of ruins. One of Soane’s greatest commissions was for a new Bank of England. Gandy transformed the architectural drawings into realistic paintings, one of which showed the Bank as a ruin, a thousand years in the future.

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Leisureguy on Mastodon updated his post on Nordic walking and that proved the stimulus I needed to take up sticks again. I had a good workout yesterday, and as we discussed the topic, knowing that he used an Apple Watch, as do I, I asked which activity he used to record Nordic walks. Because of course Apple doesn’t believe people need to record their Nordic walks.

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