Business style

Now this is what I call a dunning letter from an accountant, received by someone of my acquaintance and passed on to me for my delectation. My UK accountant could learn a lesson or two. Dear Sisters, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for the opportunity to assist with your 2023 tax filings. It […]

Uses of AI

Met one of my odder relatives, someone who has a life-limiting illness which has made him more peculiar but he was always a bit odd. He told me he is using ChatGPT to write letters for his newborn granddaughter to read after he is dead. The prompt he gives is ‘write a letter to my […]

Floods of guests

A number of guests today and yesterday, including friends and including an unexpected friend of my mother who had heard we were all in town and just turned up, stayed for hours, ate lunch, left and nearly caused a rift with a neighbour who rang to demand why she hadn’t been told about the visitor. […]

Full day

Our only full day of the four of us plus my father together. Most of it was spent with others actually, as first one aunt arrived with her grandchild (a rather odd looking creature, like the baby in Spirited Away, but a sweet and seemingly ordinary child with a penchant for wearing backpacks, and then […]

Gathering forces

In Lahore. The flight was long and, rather to my annoyance, my seat was one of the bulkhead ones, which are much desired by the longer limbed, and pay a premium for them. I didn’t pay a premium, but the plane was changed so found myself assigned a far more expensive seat than I’d have […]

Sudden decision

This morning I woke at 5 to finish some work and just as I completed it at around 7, I got a call from my father, saying that my siblings were all going to be in Lahore this weekend, why don’t I come too? I looked at tickets, they were very expensive, and then there’s […]

Strawberries in winter

A good article on changing seasons, or rather on unchanging seasons, and on the harms of 24/7 convenience stores. We eat our strawberries, not knowing where they came from or at what cost, but they do taste nice. And if they spoil, we throw them out and buy more. Indeed, the increasingly superficial celebration of […]

The ways of fruit

Is fruit a snack, a meal or a dessert? In my mind definitely a dessert and I rarely think of it as something to eat between meals and almost never for breakfast. Struck me this time when in the UK where the people I am staying with definitely think of it as the first two, […]