Joshua Bell is, of course, a known quantity: fairly callow not long ago, his playing has matured nicely in recent seasons.
RW: Actually, that was a fairly long time ago.
If you know the bigger bits of British wildlife fairly well, you might long ago have given up on the idea of surprises.
But game controllers, those button-laden pads used to play the games on these consoles, are fairly standard stuff, having long ago lost any cutting-edge charm.
When Robin and I hang out in NYC, it's mainly on the Upper West Side — which not that long ago was fairly sedate.
Ben Culverhouse, a Year 5 teacher at High Down junior school in Portishead I was talking to a fairly new teacher not too long ago and she'd phoned a parent and simply said, "I'm worried about [name].
"A number of years ago, we had fairly long bankruptcies, where companies could come out as stand-alone enterprises," said Joe Bondi, a managing director of Alvarez & Marsal, a turnaround and restructuring firm.
The notion of teenagers as an alien species on a mission of destruction is of fairly recent origin (until not so long ago, teenagers were too busy working or bearing children to run riot), but the fear of new generations goes back forever.
Not long ago, one soldier fairly drove the others mad with his requests for Juan Gabriel, a Latin American crooner ("The Neil Diamond of Central America" scoffed one announcer) while another prompted his comrades to pay the station to silence his request -- "Life is a Roller Coaster" by Ronan Keating.
"Friends" was still a fairly new television series, that's how long ago it was.
