Happy Easter everyone! Also Happy Birthday, if it is also your birthday. It is my birthday. So Happy Birthday to me! Having a birthday which falls on Easter Sunday is not like having a birthday which falls on Christmas. Mainly because it doesn’t happen every year, but also because people don’t conflate Easter eggs and…
Category: James Proclaims
A Redundant Post To Announce My Return To Blogging After An All Too Brief Hiatus
Hello dear readers. After announcing that I would be having a break from blogging just over a week ago, I’m now announcing my return. This does presuppose that anyone cares, which is, perhaps, too great an assumption all things considered. On the other hand, if I didn’t announce my return then how would anyone know…
Ten Important Things I Have Learned After Blogging Every Day For A Year
Today marks my 365th post in 365 days. I have managed to write a post every single day for an entire year. That I accomplished this by writing a lot of syllable-based poetry should not detract from the fact that it is, none-the-less, a stellar achievement. I deserve all the plaudits I’m inevitably going to…
A Sort Of Penultimate Post
Yesterday I posted a haiku that, as with all my haikus, failed to meet most of the criteria to qualify as a haiku, and might, instead, be more accurately described as a senryu. Indeed it might be even more accurate to describe it as a small collection of words. Irrespective of its credentials, however, the…
A Post That Might Be About Something But Probably Isn’t
Sometimes on my way to work I go for breakfast at a place the kids tend to call a ‘Drive Through’ and the really cool kids call a ‘Drive Thru’. Although the specific fast-food chain is irrelevant, I live in the UK, and as far as I am aware there is only one company, the…
The Key Ingredients To A Good Blog Post
James Proclaims is made with the finest selection of high-quality verbs and suffixes, punctuated by a delicate array of commas, colons and apostrophes. We don’t use any artificial adjectives in any of our posts and all of our exclamations are free-range. James Proclaims can be enjoyed as part of a balanced reading diet but is…
An Exclusive Offer From James Proclaims
With the end of lockdown in sight it’s time to start making plans and at James Proclaims, we would like to help you to to make the most of the New Normal, with exclusive access to our new outdoor blogging club. Take advantage of our pre-opening offer and get your first month free and no joining…
The James Proclaims Brand Guarantee
RETURN POLICYLast updated March 14, 2021 Thank you for choosing to read this post. We are very proud of our posts here at James Proclaims and hope you are happy with your choice of reading material. However, if you are not completely satisfied with your purchase for any reason, you may return it to us for a…
Little Proclaims Takes The Wheel
As I appear to still be plagued by writer’s block, I thought I’d let my two-year-old daughter, known to her fans as Little Proclaims, take responsibility for today’s post. Of course regular readers will be more familiar with her contributions to the art world, back when I used to post her drawings on this blog…
A Blog Post That Is Today’s Blog Post Unless You Are Reading It On A Different Day
It’s Sunday afternoon as I write this. Little Proclaims is having a nap, Mrs Proclaims is working on her PhD and I am steadfastly ignoring a report I am supposed to be writing for work. To be fair the report is mostly done, and to be even fairer, no-one is ever actually going to read…
A Token Post
Hello dear readers and welcome back to the multi-award nominated blog, James Proclaims. Since the end of March 2020 I have been posting on a daily basis but I almost didn’t manage to post anything today. As it is I’m already over twelve hours late in posting this, given that my usual arbitrary blogging time…
A Churlish Celebration Of World Book Day
Happy World Book Day everyone! Because if you live in the UK, then today is World Book Day. If you live somewhere else then it probably isn’t. Because we ‘celebrate’ World Book Day on a different day to the rest of the world. Which means that we should call it ‘UK Book Day’. But we…
Of Leeks, Daffodils, Cakes And Superheroes
Yesterday, I wrote a post in which I made claims to be Welsh, so it would seem negligent not to acknowledge that today is St David’s Day, given that St David is the patron saint of Wales. I don’t know much about St David himself, but I’m not sure that’s really the point of a…
Come On Wales!
I am Welsh. Sort of. I was actually born in England, to an English mother and a sort of Indian father. My father was born in India, but moved to the UK when he was four years old. He grew up in England but moved to Wales when he was eighteen to go to university…
A Post That May Leave You Cold
These days I generally schedule my posts in advance, even the bad poetry, which means that I am guilty of committing those crimes against literature in cold blood. But this morning I woke up and realised I had no post scheduled. So this post is as close to a ‘live performance’ as I can get…
Doing Precisely What We’ve Done 18 Times Before Is Exactly The Last Thing They’ll Expect Us To Do This Time
As I write this it is Monday morning, and we’ve yet to formally hear any details of Boris Johnson’s ‘roadmap’ to lifting lockdown. He’s going to speak later. But details have been leaked. And those details look suspiciously like the ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown 1. Is it unfair of me to compare our very real…
A Relatively Charming Post About Not Much At All
As I write this, it is 8:30 on Sunday morning, though it will be Monday by the time this reaches either of my regular readers. Thus far today I have completed a fairly taxing workout that mostly comprised of doing lots of press ups (to anyone from outside of the UK, the ‘press up’ is…
Virtual Participation
The other day I had to attend a conference of sorts. It’s not a regular feature of my job but it happens once in a while. In normal times ‘attending’ would have meant driving or travelling by train for an hour or so, rolling up at a venue, enjoying some free coffee (and hopefully a…
I Want To Help You Daddy
The other day I was giving Little Proclaims a bath. I say ‘giving her a bath’, but these days my main function is to get the water to the right temperature and then hover in the background while she plays with her plastic ducks. It’s certainly not an unpleasant part of the evening but I…
A Recent ‘Conversation’ Between Me And My Two-Year-Old Daughter
“Daddeee! My welleeee!” “Oh no, has your welly come off? Well I’m driving at the moment but I’ll put it back on for you when I can stop.” “Dadddeeeeee!!! My welleeee! My welleeee!” “I know sweetheart but I can’t stop the car at the moment.” “My welleeee! My welleeee! My welleeeeeee!” “I’m really sorry darling,…
A Post That Is Mainly About Watching Sport
As I write this it is Sunday afternoon. I’m watching rugby, which is one of the things I quite like to do. A lot of people might think that I like watching rugby because I used to play rugby. I have the physique of someone who might have played rugby in my younger days, before…
Snow Delightful
“Do you want to build a snowman?” a young Anna sings plaintively to her older sister, Elsa, secure in the knowledge that this offer will be rejected as it always is. I know this because Little Proclaims, my two-year-old daughter, is a fan of the hit Disney movie Frozen. Well, less a fan of the…
Fifty Shades Of Blue
According to some, today is Blue Monday. ‘Blue Monday’ is the pseudoscientific name often attributed to the third Monday in January, which is purported to be the most depressing day of the year. Although obviously complete nonsense, it does hold up to a small amount of scrutiny – Christmas is now long forgotten but the…
A Prosaic Post About Productive Posting And Pretentions Of Prodigious Poetic Performance
According to the Gods of WordPress, this is my 900th post since I started this blog, back in the fifth month of the year that I like to refer to as 2015. 299 of those posts (including this one) have occurred since I started, what is now comfortably, my longest ever blogging streak on the…
Lockdown 3 – The Miracle Of Science
And so here we are in another lockdown. It is officially ‘Lockdown 3’ in England, and we must distinguish between the UK and England, because other parts of the UK have been doing things differently, but with, it must be said, similar levels of success. Which is to say hardly any success at all. ‘Lockdown…
2020 Foresight
The return to work after Christmas is always a difficult one. January is not the best of months anyway, what with all the obligatory self-improvement and cold weather, and having to work seems to just be adding insult to injury. January 2021 comes with some bonus challenges of course, thanks to the ongoing pandemic which,…
Resolving To Be Resolute
As is customary on the first day of the year I intend to make some resolutions in order to stop being the rubbish version of me that the world has come to know and instead become a really good version of me. Maybe even to become the best me that I can be. But that…
Thinking Outside Of The Boxing Day
While I always like to write a Christmas Day post, I don’t always bother on Boxing Day. There are only so many times you can make jokes about festive pugilism after all. Still, I find myself with a few moments to kill today, as my daughter is enjoying her afternoon nap and my wife, who…
The Sixth Annual Christmas Message from James Proclaims
Merry Christmas! Sorry, my mistake. I forgot that Christmas had been cancelled this year. Being an established misanthrope I would have no doubt chosen to spend today with my wife and child and absolutely no-one else, regardless of any pandemics, so here at Proclaims Towers it really is starting to look a lot like Christmas.…
Locking It Down As The UK Goes Viral Again
As I write this, it is Sunday morning, but due to my propensity to write my posts slightly in advance of the day I publish them, this will likely be on my blog on Monday. That’s just the kind of advance planning I do to ensure that a rather niche and little-read blog is able…
No Vembers Were Harmed In The Writing Of This Post
I don’t know what a vember is but it matters very little because we are officially in the one month of the year when they are scarce. At least I presume the lack of available vembers is the etymology behind the naming of the eleventh month of the year. Although I obviously know that it…
