Latest Articles from The Vandal AKA Derek Haines

No Way Am I Buying A Big Mac!

I avoid the Evil Empire of McDonald’s and the Big Mac. Here’s why? Because here where I live, there is an even better reason to give the Golden Arches a big miss. No, it’s not that a Big Mac is chemical warfare against my internal digestive organs or that one bite can deliver inches on my waistline within minutes. No. The reason I will not buy a Big Mac is that because I happen to live in Switzerland, a Big Mac will cost me a whopping $7.54! Yes, and the price doesn’t include fries and a Coke! According to the Economist’s Big Mac Index, if I had the notion to buy a Big

European English

European English in everyday use “I am called Sylvie, and we are three in our family, and during two weeks we have been in Spain taking a wonderful holiday. We were very interested to see the bull fighting and we had a lovely weather all the time we were there. I am the only child in my family, but my father and mother are my nicest friends so I am not very much lonely. When we came back from Spain to our home in France we realised how much we had profited from our holiday. Normally we must to return to work on Monday. Our holiday was less long this

A Cat Named Sloopy

I thought I might share one of my favourite poems with you today. If you’ve ever heard Rod McKuen recite this, you’ll know how wonderfully touching it is. He is truly one of my all-time favourite poets, and was so lucky to have met him once briefly when I was young. Enjoy. A Cat Named Sloopy Rod McKuen In memory of my late fat cat Pashosh. For a while the only earth that Sloopy knew was in her sandbox. Two rooms on Fifty-fifth Street were her domain. Every night she’d sit in the window among the avocado plants waiting for me to come home (my arms full of canned liver

The Perfect Tense

What do you know about the perfect tense? While all languages have their positive attributes, be it structure, rhythm, sound or lexis, English has one of the most unique tenses. It is one that we tend to forget all about when we are writing. In some manner it does exist in some other languages, but not to the extent that it can be used in English. What is it? It is the present perfect. More correctly it should be called an aspect rather than a tense, but I won’t quibble about its grammatical name. In my view, it should be renamed the experience tense, the tense of the living or