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What’s worth keeping (and what isn’t)

In recent times I’ve had the opportunity to re-evaluate my past personal history with some fascinating results. Nearly thirty years ago now my first wife died of cancer and – for a change of scenery – my kids, then quite young, and I moved some seven miles as the crow flies to a new home in [...]

May 9, 2021 // 0 Comments

Lockdown observations in a full-on day

I once met a psychiatrist who specialised in geriatrics who opined that character faults were heightened as the person grows older. For ‘growing old’ I would substitute ‘in lockdown’. I confess to being more than irritated by casual service and in the last 48 hours encountered this in [...]

May 6, 2021 // 0 Comments

Great Lives/Harry Hopkins

Radio 4’s Great Lives can can be very variable. As often as not the subject is some female trail-blazer of whom I have never heard. Yesterday Matthew Parris presented an episode on Harry Hopkins advocated by Jonathan Dimbleby a respected historian of World War Two. Harry Hopkins was the [...]

May 5, 2021 // 0 Comments

It’s complicated (as they say) …

Being the Rust’s contributing editor on the sport of pugilism, I cannot not claim for myself the privilege of being a particular fan of football. However, it seems to me that one of the ironies highlighted by the recent “attempted breakaway” ESL debacle at the pinnacle of European [...]

May 4, 2021 // 0 Comments

All the world’s a stage when you think about it

In common with something like twelve million other Brits, last night I stayed up well past my normal bedtime of 7.30pm in order to watch the seventh and final episode of Series 6 of Jed Mercurio’s highly-successful “police procedural” drama Line Of Duty [BBC1 9.00pm]. I have not long awoken [...]

May 3, 2021 // 0 Comments

That eternal question – what’s the BBC coming to?

I begin my contribution to this organ today by admitting that it is fashionable these days to criticise the BBC. In fact – arguably – it has always been thus, to the point where some veteran Beeb insiders peddle the line that, if on any remotely controversial topic they’re taking [...]

May 2, 2021 // 0 Comments

Then And Now

A few weeks ago a fellow Rust columnist name-checked a British television channel called Talking Pictures TV, founded in 2015, which broadcasts free-to-air vintage films and television programmes and – as I understand it – can be seen via Freeview, Sky and Virgin Media (though I may be [...]

April 30, 2021 // 0 Comments

Women and Sport (continued)

As regular Rusters will be aware, despite being an old-fashioned Neanderthal born in the 1950s, I like to demonstrate my continuing relevance to younger generations by monitoring and occasionally featuring on this organ bulletins from the brave new “woke” world as the “Monstrous [...]

April 28, 2021 // 0 Comments

The ESL – how it was reported

It’s an interesting and in its own way instructive if not informative process to review that reporting of the rise and immediate fall of the ESL. No one broke the story as a scoop and few bothered with the detail when the project emerged. There was a clue as neither Real Madrid nor UEFA seemed [...]

April 27, 2021 // 0 Comments

A win-win for nobody?

Like I suspect many sports fans, over the last few days I’ve been watching developments in football’s European Super League debacle at one remove with something like “rubbernecking” fascination. At one remove because I’m not a particular devotee of football – I’ve never been a [...]

April 21, 2021 // 0 Comments

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