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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

Goodbye To All That (Mark 2)

Some sixty-plus years ago now I was sent aged 7 (actually I turned 8 two months into my first term) to a boarding prep school in East Sussex, an experience which – after about a week of initial nightly blubbing – I grew to love and thrive upon. Like the bulk of my contemporaries, [...]

May 12, 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

Get a life, everybody!

Today I’m coming out of the closet – if that is the appropriate phrase – as a curmudgeonly old fascist git. We hear and read plenty these days about how “woke” the modern world has become (or is it just the Millennials, or even our “Generation X” youngsters as a group, that is being [...]

March 24, 2021 // 0 Comments

Defence is a no-win matter

Today is the anniversary of the imposition of the UK’s first lockdown – a milestone that I’m sure most of us will not be celebrating. During my overnight trawl of the newspaper websites I noticed a piece in The Independent detailing that apparently the nation’s total of 126,000 Covid-19 [...]

March 23, 2021 // 0 Comments

The dilemmas of uncertain times

The other day it occurred to me that in these uncertain and troubled times one of the few advantages of being an oldie is that one doesn’t have to worry about how to obtain a decent job and make one’s way in the world. For good or ill, whether by now one has become a multi-millionaire basking [...]

March 6, 2021 // 0 Comments

Keeping in touch with modern life (up to a point)

I suspect in common with many Rusters from time to time as an oldie I find myself engaged in an unequal and often unsuccessful struggle with the inevitable onward march of developments in modern technology. My contributor colleague Michael Stuart has blogged in the past about his watershed moment [...]

February 27, 2021 // 0 Comments

The human presumption

All species live life “in the moment” – in basic terms, each morning they awake, seek out food and sustenance, “do their thing” and eventually go back to sleep again, all against the background of what the specific conditions are on any given day. It is one of the crosses to bear of the [...]

February 5, 2021 // 0 Comments

Into 2012 and beyond

Surveying the UK newspaper websites overnight – with the latest developments and reactions thereto on the advent of Lockdown Three dominating most of the coverage – I found myself moved once again to reflect upon some of the fundamentals underlying the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. I [...]

January 6, 2021 // 0 Comments

Christmas Day movies

My Christmas Day television viewing yesterday was dominated by re-runs of two classic movies – Some Like It Hot (1959, black and white, produced & directed by Billy Wilder, starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, screenplay by Wilder and I.A. L. Diamond) and The Italian Job [...]

December 26, 2020 // 0 Comments

And so it comes to this

This second supposed Covid-19 “lockdown” has somehow managed both to serve up many absurdities and yet also reveal telling reminders about how slim the gap is between “life as the human race knows [or should that be ‘knew’?] it” and complete anarchy. Let me give some examples: Yesterday [...]

November 19, 2020 // 0 Comments

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