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I blame the phantoms.

There's someone on here who used to have Viv Stanshall for his boss. And speaking of Viv Stanshall fans, I listened to Adrian Edmondson's autobiography recently, and the sole comic relief he and his sister used to get at home was the same Flanders and Swan record my grandad had (as an aside...

Bah, for short.

Sorry, I've been slow to respond to this, although the quick answer is I haven't read it. Sounds like an interesting read, and I certainly think that there has been a lot of continuity in Russia's corridors of power in terms of the way things are actuallly done as opposed to the labels attached...

Adjective, Shirley? Anyway, riches: you could get two whole operas with that much.

An easily underestimated adversary. You hear the warning cry, and your instinctive reaction merely brings your face closer to the danger.

Russia propagates many different and often contradictory accounts simultaneously as a deliberate strategy to conceal whatever the truth might be amidst a firehose of bullshit. The Kremlin troll factories are real, and their existence has been credibly established. None of the above discounts...

My informant is entirely comfortable with using the term shaman as a self-descriptor. They are aware of the debate, but reject the basic premise.

Local shaman is back from a trip abroad: CPD, which sounds incongruous to my ears in this context, with a highly thought-of practitioner who served apprenticeships in a variety of traditions. We talked, with a view to me sharing the fruits of the conversation here. The individual in question is...

Shouldn't be that much of a surprise: Russia has been heavily involved in propping up the Syrian regime against the latter's local enemies, including IS. There is also lingering deep resentment at the brutal way in which the second Chechen War was prosecuted. (One of the unintended but fairly...

I'll have to talk to them and find out whether they'd be comfortable with me sharing this, even if anonymously.

There may be more shamans around than you think. There's one who lives in my street! From what I understand, it's not so much a moral choice for the shaman, as a compulsion: there can be physical symptoms for the shaman until such time as they have accepted their shamanic role and been...

Let me know if you have any trouble finding out how to invoke this right. PMs are open if you prefer that route.

Best of luck with it, Steven. I hope you get the result you are hoping for. I did, and it didn't really come as a surprise, but there's still something about seeing it in black-and-white which is a bit disorientating.

Forgive me if I'm teaching granny to suck eggs, but there's always Right to Choose as well. I've just had my autism diagnosis confirmed, which has taken about 2 years start-to-finish in my case. As part of that diagnosis, they have referred me to my local NHS ADHD service: minimum 3 years...

I have had endless hours of fun explaining the differences between Anglophone middle names and Russian patronymics: e.g. Vladimir Ilich is "Vladimir, son of Ilya", while Raisa Ilinichna would be "Raisa, daughter of Ilya". When Russian speakers ask me if English middle names also relate to the...

Mine was probably stopping the trajectory of a way over-extended bungee rope that had let go, using my left eye to do so. It didn't really hurt, at first, although it did send me head over heels. When I opened it again, though, I could only see a wall of red. Depending on which direction I...

Bear in mind you've got two separate examples in your post.

First class!

OK, then, name a three-syllable word with only one letter in it.

It had better not be smiles. :slapd:

Dictionary?

Are you saying they'll stage a coop?

Haha! That reminds me of one of my favourites: "What five letter word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it?" I used to know a vast encyclopedia of jokes, largely for the reason Frides mentioned, although I suspect in my case it was also a coping strategy for what I otherwise lacked in...

Speaking of Yorkshire, how could you omit the infamous Rhubarb Triangle? A place which is crying out for a fabricated Fortean fable. We could call it the Rothwell Incident.

Thank you. It rings true to the situation, especially that at the moment I'm not in tune with my intuition around it, so that's a helpful reminder to try and re-attune my conscious mind to it. Regarding the wheel of fortune, the challenge has very much been and continues to be in identifying...

It's very kind of you to offer. I'd be very grateful for a read. I have a specific question in mind, but would prefer not to post it on thread, if that's OK?

Replying to myself might make me go blind, so apologies for any typos in what follows. Anyway, according to the Friends of Wollaton Park, So that certainly would give us a row of houses, but I can't see an obvious candidate for the playing field.

This blogger did a write-up in 2017, and suggests that "the swamps" might be found in a conservation area within the park, which is closed off to the public. @BS3 is there any way of checking that against the map in the book you mention? They also cite two earlier sightings of "fairy folk" in...

Oh, now, that's a question I recognise, having asked it myself over and over these past few years, ever since people close to me raised the possibility/likelihood of my own neurodivergence. I'm trying to rephrase the idea along the lines of, however difficult the first five decades of my life...

You're very kind, but right now I'm picturing a Bulgarian person nodding their head. ETA after a moment's reflection, though, I'm presuming that while there may be significant differences in conscious non-verbal communication, subconscious indicators will tend to be similar. Is that a fair...

That's just an early version of the distracted boyfriend meme, isn't it?

I confess this taboo is new to me - could you expand?

True. And, pleasingly, you can trace an etymology of "leads [you] to honey" in that word. But whenever the bear needs a name, such as in a fairy tale, it's always Misha (or MIshka if you want to really emphasise your affectionate attitude). In a similar way, in the UK, people used to talk about...

À la Russe.

Now you mention it, my attention was recently drawn to an episode of Blankety-blank featuring someone who came to public prominence in their later years. That person doesn't do all that well, but I found Wogan's interactions with the episode winner to be really creepy and predatory. And yet...

Alternatively, hit CTRL and the minus key* to reduce the size of the web page. * If using Chrome. Other browsers may have different hot-key settings.

There's a longer account of the same encounter in post 8 in this very thread.

Thanks for bumping this thread, it's a classic. Following some tangents, I came across the following post on page 18 of this Mumsnet thread. The similarities with post 8 on this thread are uncanny.

My initials are IRA...

Only two days after the discovery. Coincidence? :pipe:

Use the search function: - change the option in the first drop-down from "Everywhere" to "this thread". - Put your own username in the "By" field. - Search. Granted, that will only turn up anything you might have added to the given thread, as opposed to the forum generally, but it might be a...

He was, but he was extremely unusual. I can only really think of Beckett and Conrad as other examples of successful literateurs in a second language. It really is an extremely rare talent. By way of contrast, in a former incarnation I was a pretty good literary translator from, coincidentally...

I'm not quite convinced about the bit I highlighted. I teach ESOL, and one of the things I sometimes see my higher-level learners doing is throwing a surprisingly advanced word into their writing, in a way that doesn't quite fit: it's usually in the right ballpark in terms of meaning, but the...

Wait, are we all just going to ignore the amazing similarities in the description of the figure and hilly location in this account from Bedfordshire and that of our own dear @Quercus on Ditchling Beacon? Compare and contrast: Is this another variation on the apparently ubiquitous man in the...

That's interesting. Our local CAMHS rejected my younger child's diagnosis on the ostensible basis that it was unclear what methods had been used to reach it. She had been diagnosed by the leading neurodivergence specialist in the Republic of Ireland at the time, a well-known and respected...

I'd like to publicly acknowledge my gratitude for your generosity in helping me make sense of all this, and I also now do think I'm one of us. Have done for quite a while now, in fact. I'm still not really sure why I went for the official diagnosis, although given that I'm currently drowning in...

Thanks for sharing this. So much of it resonates with my own experience, not least a child's diagnosis leading to realisations about my own neurodivergence. FWIW I'm waiting for an official diagnosis, but I'll be amazed (and, actually, quite distressed) if they turn round and tell me I'm not...

We'll have to take your word for it. I can't see your face behind the mad scientist.