Today’s been two days in one.

It’s not that I’m particularly busy, since I couldn’t honestly claim that this is the case. It’s just that my day in the office started at 06:30 and is scheduled to finish at 22:15.

This was totally the norm three years ago, when I was covering three positions. My timesheet once showed 92.25 hours once.

Somebody once asked me how it’s possible to work 92.25 hours in a single week, so here’s a quick explanation:

• Saturday, Sunday, Monday = 15 hours
• Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday = 13 hours
• Friday = 8.25 hours

I’m not slipping into bad habits though: I’ve had a few hours off around lunchtime.

So how does this pertain to now?

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By C. J. Sansom

The fourth book in the series sees Shardlake far removed from politics, following his request to Archbishop Cranmer at the end of the previous book, Sovereign.

The year is 1543. Henry VIII’s tyrannical reign is in a state of flux. He’s now giving up on his new religion and is reverting to Catholic traditions, minus the bit about the Pope being the head.

The streets are an unsettling place, as people no longer know what to believe. Two whales wash up in the Thames, yet another sign from above that the world is going to end.

Shardlake, once a reformer, has seen enough over the years to make him agnostic. Would that everyone else could be like that. Unfortunately, such is not the case, especially as one villain, who has taken it upon himself to murder people who have lost their convictions in gruesome ways which mirror the prophecies in the book of Revelations. The final target may even be Catherine Parr, recently widowed, and desired by the king.

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By David Crystal

Proscribe Prescription. A memorable, straightforward tagline if ever I saw one, and this is the premise of this book, yet another on the conveyor from the eminent professor in the fields of language and linguistics.

This is a reaction to the best-selling book on punctuation Eats, Shoots & Leaves, written by Lynne Truss. Crystal’s aim is to encourage people to break the shackles imposed by centuries of pedants, such that many people are afraid of language, unsure whether what they are saying is ‘correct’.

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I had a meeting for the Language Show to attend yesterday. The meeting took place in Peterborough, which is straight down the A47, a happy coincidence being that my sister lives just off that same road (as do I, for that matter).

This worked out well for me since she’d cagily asked me whether I had any plans for the weekend. You see, it’s our dad’s birthday soon and she wanted her little boy to make him a card. However, she seems to have determined that I have the mind of a child and can probably help Alfie do it better than she can.

So, the die was cast, the fates sealed, and I replied that I could stop by hers en route to the meeting.

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By David Crystal

I’m a language fan. I speak a few to relatively high levels.

If you factor in that I’m not a native, you could call my French near fluent and my Esperanto advanced. My Italian, though rusty, is not so bad that I can’t pick up a magazine and read it. My understanding of Spanish, relatively untried and certainly untaught, is passive enough that I used documentation from the Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe in my MSc dissertation, and I successfully translated an excerpt from a novel to Radio the other day.

I have knowledge of other languages that is functional for tourism reasons but not for conversation. I’m thinking of German and Swedish here, both of which I have used to limited degrees on my travels, and the grammars of which I have read.

You can factor in the historical aspect of language too. I’m very well versed on the history of English and its progression over last 1500 years, and was just this morning reading a grammar of Old and Middle English.

I’ve also read a few books on linguistics over the years, including breakdowns of a couple hundred diverse languages from all over the world. I’ll be doing it again soon after purchasing Nicholas Ostler’s Empires Of The Word, nearly 700 pages dedicated to language from the first moment that they were written down.

Add all these factors together and you’ll likely reach a seemingly obvious conclusion:

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By Frederick Forsyth

This is the fifth novel written by that master of his trade, Frederick Forsyth. I thoroughly enjoyed the first four, all masterpieces of creativity, research, and imagination.

Forsyth excels in introducing many disparate threads and, over 400 pages, interweaving them into a thrilling conclusion. This one is more of the same.

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By Dava Sobel

I’ve long been entranced by space, ever since I was a little kid. There occured many occasions, perhaps before I hit double figures, where my child’s mind would try to get my head around the fact that before there was nothing … there was something.

It was phenomenal to me to envisage that way back when, before people, before the things from which people spawned, before ooze, before rocks and desert, when there was nothing at all … there was something.

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What is it with people throwing around words unnecessarily, superfluously, redundantly?

There’s a grammatical concept called tautology, which is when one uses a word redundantly, since another word in the phrase carries the same meaning.

Examples would be such things as current incumbent (the latter word means “the current occupant”), bad headache (are there any other kinds?), and adequate enough.

I also have a disdain for corporate-speak.

So when tautology and corporate-speak meet, I find myself wanting to murder people to death.

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