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Articles by Martin Roberts

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About Martin Roberts

A former motoring journalist, Martin lists amongst his greatest achievements giving up smoking. Three times. He holds to the view that growing old is not for the faint-hearted. More Posts

You CAN be serious!

All four regular readers of the sports pages of this esteemed organ will be all too familiar with our two longest-running debating points. However, for visitors from Mars, or indeed those who have erroneously alighted here completely by chance when searching the internet for something else, I list [...]

June 27, 2017 // 0 Comments

Why does it always happen to me?

About forty-five years ago I came across a couple roughly my parents’ age who ran a preparatory school. Both were steeped in academia and the wife, interested in linguistics, was a huge fan of Noam Chomsky’s seminal tome Theory Of Universal Grammar Is Right; It’s Hardwired Into Our Brains [...]

November 18, 2016 // 0 Comments

Some things never change – or should they?

There’s a new survey out that apparently concluded that nobody above a certain age – the beginning of one’s sixth decade – should ever wear a pair of jeans. See here for a piece on this in – THE GUARDIAN Confession time. I’m writing today as someone who lives by the Bob Dylan lyric [...]

November 3, 2016 // 0 Comments

It’s all in the mind – or is it?

For someone who played a lot of sport in my youth, albeit in a ‘keen but averagedly talented’ fashion, I reckon I’m in reasonable shape. I’ve had the occasional twinge over the years – e.g. two broken matatarsals in my feet (one retaining its metal pin some four [...]

July 17, 2016 // 0 Comments

Whoever would ever have thought it?

[Disclaimer: There’s been a long-running in-joke on the Rust team for years about ‘filler’ media reports setting out supposed insightful findings about humanity, as discovered by obscure research teams in obscure universities around the world, usually via surveys they have conducted featuring [...]

May 24, 2016 // 0 Comments

Between a Rock and a hard place

Between 1992 and 1994 I had a brief love affair with Apple products. I can pin-point the start of it because it was the year that the outcome of the infamous ITV franchise process instigated by the swivel-eyed Maggie Thatcher took effect, in the sense that those companies who had lost theirs had to [...]

March 11, 2016 // 0 Comments

Getting to the nub of it

Sometimes I get a little confused, when I alight upon a rather smart aphorism, as to whether I’ve heard it elsewhere – e.g. via a quotation or written extract from a literary great, a politician, celebrity film star or artist, philosopher, wit or comedian – or I actually came up with myself. [...]

January 17, 2016 // 0 Comments

A rewarding evening

Due to a prior engagement up Oxford way, I began driving home to London at about 9.00pm last night and did so accompanied by Radio Five Live’s live coverage of the second half of Leicester City 2-1 victory over Chelsea, commentary by Guy Mowbray and Robbie Savage. I’m not a huge [...]

December 15, 2015 // 0 Comments

Well, I suppose you live and learn …

If I sound shocked I supposed I shouldn’t be, really. Being in what I consider the final third of my life span I know that my kids evidently regard me as beyond help in terms of modern life and technology but I have always thought that some aspects of the human condition remain universal and [...]

December 3, 2015 // 0 Comments

I’m probably missing the point, but …

Yesterday Deputy Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt of the Metropolitan Police faced the media to issue a public apology to the world as part of an attempt to bring to an end to the ‘scandal’ of a series of undercover policemen having intimate sexual relationships with unsuspecting women [...]

November 21, 2015 // 0 Comments

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