IT’S CHALLENGING to write about The Rule of Three because it’s such a fundamental part of culture, so embedded in our way of thinking, that even those who could not tell you precisely what it is already know about it intuitively.
FRIEND recently took me to task for a grammatical error I made in a Facebook post. I haven’t caught up with him since, so I don’t know whether he was being serious or not, but he was right: I made a grammatical error, and I did it deliberately.
THE WOMAN in the seat in front of us on the bus we had never intended to take was Asian - perhaps Filipina - middle-aged and dressed like a fashion buyer. She spoke softly in perfect Italian into her smart phone, which she charged from a USB port in the roof of the coach. At one point, she caught my eye and smiled.
I GUESS I HAVE ALWAYS been a “walker”. When I was a kid growing up in the town locals nicknamed Slaggy Island, I would often walk the four miles or so to the bottom of the North York Moors escarpment and then scrabble up 750 feet or so to reach Eston Nab, once the site of an Iron Age hill fort.
THE RAVEN ON the dockside roof cackled into the wind, its range of vocalisations surprisingly broad. There was that familiar low kronking call like a football rattle slowed down, and a series of chattering noises ending in a higher, repetitive sound almost like laughter. There were no other ravens in sight, and as we walked across Ísafjörður high up in Iceland’s Westfjords I played with the idea that it was trying to tell us something. I couldn’t guess what*.
WHEN I WAS just 17, Simon & Garfunkel released the album Bookends, which included the plaintive song of ageing Old Friends.
The first verse sets the scene. ‘Old friends sat on a park bench like bookends. A newspaper blown through the grass falls on the round toes of the high shoes of the old friends.’
