So, what do we know about dragons?

They're reptilian, for a start, and this could well indicate cold blooded. Their relatively infrequent feeding would tend to support this hypothesis.

They're big. No question there, everyone agrees. At least horse sized, and probably house sized. Of course, people tend to exaggerate, bringing shrews down to gnat dimensions, and postulating mosquitoes that fly away with small children, but I think we can be certain they are considerably...

My linguistically divided brain contorts and complains. It finds words, the essence of rational thought, on both sides of the barrier, reassuringly similar, and builds bilateral concepts, then discovers surface similarities are not enough. 'Peasant', universally pejorative in English, becomes 'paysan', the equivalent of the English yeoman as it crosses the channel, the tough hardy 'man of the land' who is the basis of agriculture, the independent spirit. Did the change come with the revolution,...

The predicted blizzard closed Gatwick, and planes were cancelled, but mine took off a mere hour late, packed to the earballs with passengers who'd failed to get onto earlier flights, and -- well, you know it was an uneventful flight. Eventful ones get mentioned on the news.

Unfortunately there had apparently been no space left for my suitcase, which stayed in Geneva with my toothbrush, clean underwear, cheese and chocolate (I was lucky not to be thrown out into the snow by my...

I've been writing a song for the start titles of an animated cartoon. Complicated, because it's only forty seconds, and the message (specific words they want to use) is fixed, and because, at the start they only requested a seven-footed line, to match the French, and my musician put stressed syllables at the end of every line (which, seeing they wanted "future" and "present" as accented terms, which doesn't make my job any easier) Still, I'm not one to back down from a challenge;...

Oh, dear, I've upset someone.

Following clues like an anal bloodhound it would seem someone has packed up and left because I was not nice in Critiques. And it is true that I am not nice therein, that is perfectly true; though my experience I am no more unpleasant than influential others the writing will encounter on its tortuous road toward fame and glory, and I'm easy to ignore.

I was encouraged, paradoxically enough, by the support I got, from people I can't even...