Tony Quarrington

I had a Latin teacher at school called Mr Beattie, though the poor, unfortunate man was more affectionately known as “Bogroll Beattie” by the ungrateful rabble that passed for his pupils.

Now, at this point, I feel I may have to explain to my American readers why the word “bogroll” should be considered at all amusing and clever by successive classes of pre-pubescent boys.  Well, simply, “bog” is a slang term for “toilet” which, in turn, is called “washroom” in the U.S.  And “bogroll” is a roll of toilet paper.  Which, before we move on, leads me to ask why that is not, therefore, called “washroom paper”?  

Anyway, I digress.  And I’m afraid that I don’t have any juicy toilet – or washroom – based stories to recount that would justify his nickname.  We were 12 years old and it was the early sixties after all, and in that much more innocent age our scatalogical dictionary was a much slimmer volume than that available to our counterparts today. 

It is clear testament, however, to how much my brain has matured since then that my first thought when encountering, for the first time, the word “blogroll”  on this site is of that brave man who strove to inflict a language “as dead as dead can be” on me at a time when the Beatles, Eagle and Hornet magazines and Gillingham Football Club alone inhabited my cultural landscape. 

When I started this post it was not meant to be an analysis of that common language by which we are separated from our American friends, but rather about the “blogroll” which lurks down the right hand column of this site.  And all I wanted to do was to draw your attention to it, particularly if you are unfamiliar with the blogging world, and advise that you can link into a number of my favourite websites from there, for example the San Francisco Chronicle, Heavenly Ski Resort or the Kent (England) tourism site.  You can even book a highly recommended apartment in San Francisco, indeed the one my wife and I will be staying at in the Spring.

So if you are interested in any of those subjects, be aware that you can access them from this blog with just one click.  I will probably add to them over time, though I will keep them to a manageable minimum for fear of over-cluttering the screen and rendering navigation exhausting.