Introduction

I published Glanglish, a collection of essays, back in 1990.  And I mean published in the traditional sense: it was a physical book – second-hand copies can still be found on the usual sites.  Those 52 essays were just a selection of the many that I had written at that time, chosen because I presumably thought they were the most suitable.  I wrote even more of them afterwards, and vaguely contemplated a second collection, but was dissuaded from doing so by the complete failure of the first set.

Recently I came across hard copies of all the unpublished essays, each of which is exactly one page long. I do have digital versions, but they are on three-inch floppy discs, as used on the Amstrad PCW 8256, my main computer system for many years.  These non-standard discs are impossible to read nowadays unless you pay exorbitant sums to one of the few data services that can still convert them.  So I have decide to re-type all the essays – great exercise for my piano-playing fingers – and to put them online here as they appear in those hard copies, without any further editing, other correcting obvious mistakes.  I have around 150 to type up, so it will take a while as I work my way through them, in no particular order.

I have chosen to list them chronologically, since I was curious to see what I was writing about when, and how productive I was at various times.  I have included the Glanglish essays in their relevant chronological position to show how the fit into my overall essay production, and what other essays I could have chosen, but didn’t. They are marked with an asterisk, and link to the main Glanglish site, which includes audio versions of all the essays appearing there, for those who might find that an interesting alternative way of approaching them.