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In case you are unfamiliar with the word, a mountebank is a quack, a travelling snake oil salesman.

The origin of the word is hilarious. It comes from Italian – someone who gets up on a bench in order to be seen by the crowd.

Reported in The Times of November 3, 2021

A jobless “demanding” Oxford graduate who trained to be a lawyer lost his appeal to force his wealthy parents to pay him maintenance for life. Faiz Siddiqui, 41, claimed he was dependent on his parents, who cut their support after a row. The Court of Appeal said parents were under no legal duty to support their adult children.

So there we have it – a judgement of the Court Of Appeal – that parents do not have a duty to support their adult children.

When parents are elderly, do children have a duty to support them? Probably not in law.

NHK WORLD-JAPAN is the international service of Japan’s public media organization NHK. It provides the latest information on Japan and Asia through television, radio and online to a global audience.

This is the link to the NHK page to learn Japanese – and it’s free!

1. a reader, especially someone who reads lessons in a church service.

2. a lecturer, especially one employed in a foreign university to teach in their native language.

Isn’t FaceBook the equivalent of going down the pub and chatting with people?

It’s only a forum for heavy political debate if that’s what people want. And if a particular person is always talking about politics and never talks about anything else, then eventually the people he associates with will get fed up with the fact that he’s always banging on about the same thing – because they are down the Facebook pub and they want a bit of everything, not endless politics.

What’s a boy to do?

He could find a forum where people are as enthusiastic as he is about politics.

He could find more appreciative friends who see his concerns as laudable and are always prepared to give them houseroom.

He could become isolated and read extremist literature in his bedroom like the man who killed Jo Cox.

So be careful who you shun.

Three women sitting in Starbucks middle-age women could be my age or maybe older. And for whatever reason my attention was drawn to one of them. She was staring ahead, not quite staring into space but just sitting.

And to me she looked like she didn’t particularly want to be there but more importantly it occurred to me that she was waiting for life to start. Maybe she’s been running for years and years right into middle age waiting for her life to start, waiting for somebody else to start it without realising that she has to be the one that starts it.