It's in a couple of old Tom interviews. Said she lived in Putney, too. A Maria Begona Pope of Putney died a few years ago (Begoña is a Spanish name) - although if it had been her, she'd only have been in her early 40s at the time, not the dotty old woman of the anecdote.

That TV aerial is clearly the wrong polarisation for the transmitter it's pointed at.

Latest "how to spot AI" list just dropped.

buttondown.com/cooray_smith... For paid subscribers, but there's always the option to join them in the City of Morphoton: Who really created Doctor Who anyway?

That'll be because it's a local dialect word, presumably from the Dutch. OED has it in quotations back to the 1820s.

English term for rodents does too, if you go back far enough (from Latin rodere to gnaw, it says 'ere)

This (unfortunately sans the groovy computery typeface) is what it looked like. Just $19.95 plus postage, but that was $19.95 in 1969 money.

Well, yes. But you'd need some concept of how long it needs to be in order to make one. And whilst The Internet tells me they date back to the 14th century, it's not at all clear of that means egg timers or sand timers (such as hourglasses) in general.

e.g. "What sets Satriani apart from the average guitar wanker is his sense of melody."

Not directly relevant but, in the 90s, a lot of US rock writing seems to have adopted "guitar wankers" as a term for the new generation of virtuoso rock guitarists. One can only imagine where they got that from.

youtu.be/RUVLxJGOdtw?...

Also profiled in the Mirror a few months earlier. www.newspapers.com/article/dail...