Benjamin Judge is in his fifties…
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Writing and that
So, the other thing I want to do in my fifties is get back to doing good writing with words. I thought I would get the blog back up and running to get me into the habit of writing more regularly. When I finish writing this (on the 12th of September) I will change the…
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1976, a food, lies
I was born half way through 1976 so pretty much the only thing I ate was breast milk. I’m sure there are fascinating studies written by scientists about breast milk but your average person, your man-on-the-street, your non-scientist should have one opinion only on the subject: I ate it before my brain was capable of…
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two hundred of the many squares I mentioned last week are different squares
Remember last week, when I mentioned my map, with all the squares on? Well, it has pins on too. Because I am very very cool. Greater Manchester train stations have a red pin. Train stations outside of Greater Manchester have an orange pin. Manchester Metrolink? That’s a yellow pin. Places I want to go to…
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1976, an object, the honey monster
Do I have strong feelings about the honey monster? Not really. I’ll be honest with you, I did no research for this one. I just knew I was going to visit my mom and reckoned there’d be loads of things from my childhood there that I could spin out to five hundred words. It was…
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2000 Squares
Apologies in advance if I have already told you about the squares. I have a map on my wall. A very big map. To be precise, I have parts of several maps that I have stuck together to make one big map that covers a rectangle of Northern England with corners in (approximately) Fleetwood, Chester,…
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1976, a song, Save Your Kisses For Me
I may as well state from the start: I don’t think Save Your Kisses For Me by Brotherhood of Man is a good song. In fact I think it would be relatively easy to make a case for it being a bad song. It is soppy, overly sentimental and over reliant on its chorus. [Sure,…
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1000 books
If I ranked my decades by the amount of books I read, it would probably be my thirties my twenties my teens the first ten years my forties However, if I ranked my decades by the amount of books I bought, it would be my forties my thirties my twenties my teens the first ten…
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1976, an event, the discovery of the megamouth shark and the end of reality
On the 15th of November, 1976, a US Navy research vessel found a new fish. In principle, I have no problem with that. Oceans are big, fish are small, new stuff is going to turn up now and again. But what they found fifty years ago was a fish so stupid-looking that it bends philosophies…
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1000 films at the cinema
For the last ten years, I have kept a record of everything I see at the cinema. From January 2016 to the end of 2025 I saw 621 films, or roughly 1.2 films a week. This data is made slightly useless by the Covid lockdowns (I saw 3 films at the cinema in 2020) and…
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1976, a place, Walsall
I was born in the Manor Hospital, Walsall, at about eight o’clock in the morning. I had no opinions on the town at the time. It’s not very famous, Walsall. It’s one of the few towns with a league football club that people seem not to have heard of. It was briefly ‘Europe’s Fattest City’…
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1000 Species
How easy would it be to see one thousand species of animal, in Britain, in ten years? I think, it depends. I read the other day there are seven thousand species of fly in the UK so, on that basis, pretty easy. Except, importantly, a lot of those flys are very very similar, and small,…
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1976: An Introduction
I don’t remember a thing about 1976 because I was a baby. This could end up being a major flaw of this project: a complete lack of direct knowledge of the first four of five years of my life. We are not starting strong… 1976 in the UK. It was hot. The Sex Pistols played…
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