You’re not completely sure how you got home last night. You’re worried what you might have said to those friends you were with. You just cannot find that cash which you keep in your wallet for emergencies. Strainer cannot help you with any of these problems. You’re listless. Every movement requires double the effort. There’s a headache on the horizon. Now we’re talking. It’s about time this column got around to hangover strategies. And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to see tea playing a role in the recommendations here. Sweat it out? Actually,...

The term, “flatscreen TV”, continues to be used in 2023. I sometimes wonder why. Seems to denote value, luxury, modernity. “Police seized 15 stolen flatscreen television sets”; “The room features a mini-bar and flatscreen TV”.  It’s actually been impossible to buy a new TV which isn’t flat for at least 15 years, making the “flatscreen” preface useless. Yet it persists. There’s a name for this; “redundancy”.  Other examples include “each and every”, “balsa wood” or “cease and desist”.  Like bad handwriting, these are perpetrated more often by first language users, because they rely...

I am a contrarian. All of this unpopular opining of mine may look like critical thinking, heroic truth-seeking.  But don’t be fooled; it’s just knee-jerk doggerel.  My world-view is permanently controlled by the assumption that “those millions of people talking around me can’t possibly be right”. My brain rails against whatever prevails. Remember that, especially when you catch me writing about Chinese medicine.  Remember where I am writing from. Here or there. Remember whose those surrounding millions of voices are.  If I am in my native UK, stifled by familiarity, you will find me warmly...

We’d bought quite a nice one, actually.  It had made sense because we were only the second people ever to have lived in that apartment. Everything was very modern and sleek in there, though it was also restrictively small.  We’d previously satisfied ourselves with cheap water dispensers, usually in the ghastly blue and white of those tracksuit high school uniforms (when will these trends end?).  This time, we’d plumped for something black and dark gold, something like real furniture. Tall, free-standing. Space for paper cups down there. When we moved again, it came...