On the train from London, no-one sitting next to me, I hear a woman in the seat behind asking the young man across the aisle if he has an iPhone charger. He replies that he doesn’t. I take the portable charger out of my bag and turn to speak through …
My grammar of culture has been with me in various forms since my 1999 small cultures article. I’m still working out how it works and what it can be used for. Then a recent event helped me with this. It is to do with a basic set of knowledge about …
I notice some people at the next table in a café. An older woman and man and perhaps their daughter. I notice because I can just hear traces of a language that I half recognise. Then I see something about their demeanour and appearance that resonates with people I’ve known …
In several of these blogs I take the huge liberty of writing about people I’ve encountered. This is through my own eyes based on my own history and experience. There will be other parallel, very different stories that each one of them might tell on their own terms with their …
A change in cultural activity in the bus station might have something to do with the marked shift in thinking-as-usual that COVID brought. Whereas there has always been an orderly queue (line) waiting to get on the bus, running from the left down the length of the waiting area, there …
Across from me in the café I see two woman arriving. They have an appearance which some people might consider ‘foreign’. There is anyway something particular about how they inhabit and arrange their space. They have brought from the counter a tray with cups, saucers, coffee, and confectionary on plates. …
As I sit in the university computer room, taking Stuart Hall’s advice to begin with the small and look around at what is actually going on while I am writing, I watch an ongoing tapestry of student behaviour around me. As with the hospital outpatients department referred to in an …
My blogs before September 2020 are now published in a single document – here – with a new abstract: This collection of blogs, published over seven years, comments on and engages with the topics that have also featured in my other publications: native-speakerism, neo-racist intercultural prejudice, my grammar of culture, blocks and …
I was recently unlucky enough to spend a night and almost two days in hospital accident & emergency and outpatients departments. Suffice it to say that the health traumas that took me there had by then subsided; and I was well enough to look around and observe the remarkable interactions …
I recently spent a week in a German town, going to work every day to the university. Despite my huge experience of travel, I had difficulty dealing with particular unfamiliar cultural practices. There were cycle lanes on the pavements and at pedestrian crossings; whereas in Britain they’re in the road. …