Keith Houston's Blog

I���ve been telegraphing this for a while now, but the new Shady Characters is out of its beta phase. What you see now at shadycharacters.co.uk is, I hope, faster and more accessible version of the site that preserves the appearance and content of the old one.

It pains me to admit that I���ve been working on this for almost four years (!), and things have changed a bit since then. My wife and I had our second son. I published two more books. Wordpress went from being an occasionally cumbersome w...

As I wrote last month, I���ll soon be launching a new version of Shady Characters. Specifically, I will be replacing the current version on or around Friday 17th April. You can preview the new site at https://staging.shadycharacters.co.uk; with luck, it should look more or less identical to the current version. That said, a few things will change:

Comments will be handled by email. When you submit a comment at the new site, it will pop open an email template for you to fill in. I���ll review an...

This February my family and I visited Egypt for the first time. We were fortunate to be able to go; it was an amazing trip to a fascinating country, and, of course, there was more than a little of interest for Shady Characters readers. Here are a few words and pictures about the trip.

We arrived at Cairo airport after dark, with two tired but wakeful kids in tow, and, eventually, found our taxi among a hundred others. (The driver sent us a series of photographs of the view through his wi...

As I mentioned last time, I���ve been working on a new version of blog that doesn���t rely on WordPress. That new version is just about ready to go, and I���d love to get your thoughts on it before I switch over to it permanently. A preview is available at https://staging.shadycharacters.co.uk, if you want to take a look; everything should look and work much as it does at the moment, although commenting, newsletter subscriptions and the contact page are now handled via email rather than in-page ...

As I mentioned last time, I’ve been working on a new version of blog that doesn’t rely on WordPress. That new version is just about ready to go, and I’d love to get your thoughts on it before I switch over to it permanently. A preview is available at https://staging.shadycharacters.co.uk, if you want to take a look; everything should look and work much as it does at the moment, although commenting, newsletter subscriptions and the contact page are now handled via email rather than in-page forms....

Look: I am just a blogger. I can write about punctuation, or emoji, or books, or calculators, and I can hope that my readers will enjoy it. I can post about interesting things I���ve read or watched and hope that someone else will find them interesting too. And that���s great! I never imagined I���d still be doing this (and still taking pleasure from it!) a decade and a half after I started. Nor did I imagine that blogging would give me the chance to write and publish one book, let alone four of...

Look: I am just a blogger. I can write about punctuation, or emoji, or books, or calculators, and I can hope that my readers will enjoy it. I can post about interesting things I’ve read or watched and hope that someone else will find them interesting too. And that’s great! I never imagined I’d still be doing this (and still taking pleasure from it!) a decade and a half after I started. Nor did I imagine that blogging would give me the chance to write and publish one book, let alone four of them,...

Day 10, and we are at the end of this year���s Shady Characters advent calendar! Today, to answer, belatedly, a question asked by Larry Hosken, we���re looking at PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS (����).

Welcome to the 2025 Shady Characters advent calendar! I’ll be counting down to Christmas by way of ten of the most interesting, controversial, and downright odd emoji to have appeared on our screens. Enjoy, and come back every other day or so for a new entry!

This emoji (����), which may or may not appear correctly on your device,* is called FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES. It���s a relative newcomer, gaining the Unicode stamp of approval only in 2024,1 and has been rolling out gradually across computers, smartphones and applications since then. Thanks to the vagaries of software update schedules, this means it is entirely possible that your current device is showing you a ���missing characte...