Sam Redlark

Below is a response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 5th June 2022 The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use. ~ Why does tinned food come in a 400g can? image generated by Craiyon I recently spent just under an hour in the company of Patrick Ruff, while he waited for a connecting train at York Station. Even though we had not seen one another in over four years, and had seldom communicated during that time, he spent most of our precious minutes together expounding upon a great list of small woes that plagued his daily existence. Chief among these was a recent discovery that his favourite game soup was no longer sold in tins, but in what he described as “a sort of biodegradable laminated pouch”. “I couldn't find it anywhere on the shelves in Farthings,” he rep...

image generated by Craiyon Below is a response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 19th June 2022 The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use. ~ Why do we eat pudding last? As a young girl, my grandmother, along with her mother and father, her four brothers, a St Bernard who monopolised the hearth during the winter, and an African grey parrot named Joey, all occupied a cramped bungalow, that was situated towards the end of an unmade road, in Thundersley. The road remained unpaved until the late 1990s, by which time the house had long been demolished, and many of its former occupants had been interred in the terraced churchyard at St Mary's, a couple of residential streets away. Periodically, I am called upon by the church to attend to family gravestones that have...

Below is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 14th August, 2022 The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use. ~ What are the fewest separate foods you could eat and still have a healthy, balanced diet? image generated by Craiyon For as long as I have known Lorna Swash, she has worn her hair in the style of a 1970s social worker: Cut shoulder-length using the kitchen scissors, with a dark listless fringe in need of shampoo, framing a round face, that is prominently dimpled with a pair of rosy cheeks, and drawn into a chin that is too small and incongruous with her other features. For five years it was ridiculously easy to pick her out in a crowd: Just look for the faded red anorak with the detachable sleeves. I never saw her take it off, even during in the h...