Blog
 | Douglas Watkinson February 14, 2019 |
Here’s to the Pig…
Going Home No, not me, in any sense of the phrase, but my future daughter-in-law. She and my son are off to Lanzhou for Chinese New Year. It’s the year of the pig, fyi. I thought getting around Shanghai last year was pretty tough, given that we did so in a week of national holidays, but… There’s a…
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| Douglas Watkinson August 22, 2017 |
Exploiting my nearest and dearest…
I can’t tell you how difficult it is to write about people you know! I don’t mean the cannon fodder (in writing terms!) you meet in passing, or even people you see every day and would say you knew … reasonably well. They’re dead easy to draw without a shred of conscience and sometimes they prefer the picture…
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| Douglas Watkinson August 1, 2017 |
Who put the ‘i’ in mischievous?
I’m always banging on about misuse of language, but my current beef is with the word ‘mischievous’. Who put the ‘i’ in it and made it ‘mischiev-i-ous’? It doesn’t really fall into the category of language reshaping itself with use. It doesn’t make it easier to pronounce, better to look at, easier to spell, or give it a…
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| Douglas Watkinson June 22, 2017 |
How Not To Tell a Story…
Sometime in the last century I was the Script Editor of an iconic television police series called Z Cars – (If you remember it you should probably be in a museum). Because of the sheer amount of drama the BBC was making then the Producer suggested that we cast around for new directors and a wise friend pointed…