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Articles by J S Bird

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About J S Bird

A retired academic, Jeremy will contribute article on subjects that attract his interest. More Posts

What’s going on

I awoke in a cold sweat last night after having a nightmare. Or possibly it was after realising that I hadn’t been having a nightmare at all but that in fact everything I had been ‘experiencing’ was actually true. It had to be one or the other. ‘Alternative facts’ and ‘Fake news’ [...]

May 21, 2017 // 0 Comments

First of the season

They say that simple things please simple minds and maybe that is true. Yesterday, in a party of six, I set off on board a motor launch somewhere along the south coast of England for our first outing of 2017. The co-owners of the boat always refuse to have it put it in the water before mid-May on [...]

May 12, 2017 // 0 Comments

Aspects of political correctness

Here’s an early bid to win a nomination for the shortlist of the 2017 version of the internal Rusters’ competition to find the most incongruous link between two media stories. My starting point is that familiar old bugbear of the editorial team – the wonderful world of Political Correctness. [...]

March 29, 2017 // 0 Comments

Here we go again (or do we?)

To be honest with you I physically watched only about 2 minutes’ worth of this week’s England ‘friendly’ match football 0-1 loss against Germany in Dortmund and even this was not for a sporting reason. Having spent the bulk of the afternoon glued to the box absorbing the [...]

March 24, 2017 // 0 Comments

Rubbing it in …

Yesterday I was flicking through The Times newspaper and gave myself a bit of a fright. Well, Doctor Mark Porter – who is either their medical correspondent and/or a regular columnist on medical matters – did. In a piece entitled Paternal age could be an important factor in the health of your [...]

February 22, 2017 // 0 Comments

A memorable lunch

Yesterday my brother and I took our father for a visit to where he and his parents used to live in south London between about 1932 and 1939, this before going on for lunch with one of his oldest remaining pals, with whom he had been a prep school before the start of WW2. As is the nature of life [...]

February 8, 2017 // 0 Comments

A troubling case

There is no way that you could describe me as a left-winger and – in general terms, partly due to my exposure to pals or acquaintances who have had military experience, and indeed families therefore – I am a respecter of all those who have served their country in uniform. On principle I tend to [...]

February 3, 2017 // 0 Comments

A Tortoise in Town

Yesterday (Tuesday) I had cause – taking my aged father to two routine medical appointments – to visit the centre of London by car. On Monday I had paid £11.50 for my required Congestion Charge in advance and, in the wake of recent media reports that not only is the Congestion Charge generally [...]

January 25, 2017 // 0 Comments

It’s all going crazy!

Twice every year there tends to be a disconnect between the world as it normally is and a degree of weirdness, i.e. during the August (end of summer) ‘silly season’, when not much is happening, and then the second half of December, when it’s almost a case of too much going on. It won’t have [...]

December 20, 2016 // 0 Comments

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