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Articles by William Byford

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About William Byford

A partner in an international firm of loss adjusters, William is a keen blogger and member of the internet community. More Posts

One for the old man

Yesterday, having arrived on the south coast to spend the weekend with my aged father, we had an idyllic time of it. The early conditions were so-so – to clear the overnight condensation that bedecked my car windows I had to wipe them with a cloth before I could set off at 6.00am to collect [...]

April 9, 2017 // 0 Comments

Something new every day

As regards the wonderful world of natural science I’m a complete philistine. Nobody could ever accuse me of following in the footsteps of the likes of David Attenborough, Matt Baker or Chris Packham – though I’m bound to confess that in the late 1950s, as small boy of six or seven, I became [...]

April 4, 2017 // 0 Comments

I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from*

(* Musically-inclined Rust readers may be familiar with the above lyric line from Not Dark Yet off 1997’s Time Out Of Mind, one of my all-time Bob Dylan favourite albums). Today I thought I’d begin my offering by sharing with my readers a snap of Perkins, the male pheasant who over the [...]

April 1, 2017 // 0 Comments

The art of changing one’s car

When you get to my age the years tend to fade to blancmange – you could ask me in which year between about 1997 and 2009 anything notable in my past happened and in all honesty I’d be guessing and probably have about a one in six chance of getting it right – so when I say I bought my current [...]

March 22, 2017 // 0 Comments

Snore-fest Phil

Pardon me for straying onto territory usually covered by others on the editorial team of this esteemed organ, but yesterday I decided to stay indoors from 11.30am specifically in order to watch Prime Minister’s Question Time from the House of Commons, followed by Philip Hammond, Chancellor of the [...]

March 9, 2017 // 0 Comments

Getting it right

Having begun yesterday with the assumption that there must be as many different types of family relationship as there are families, yesterday I came to the conclusion that there are may actually be a finite number – and that, one day not too far away, I’m going to read a report in the Daily [...]

March 1, 2017 // 0 Comments

Holding on by the fingertips

A recurring theme of posts to this website can be filed under the heading ‘Moans About New Technology’. These tend to range from complaints about things that don’t work – or don’t work for oldies – to discourses about whether it is just a fact of life that that the modern world [...]

January 31, 2017 // 0 Comments

It’s all around, so get used to it!

Comment upon the process of ageing is a familiar subject on the Rust – one might say it comes with the territory – and so I hope our readers will allow me this one. It seems to me there are two basic competing themes. The first is that, on a day to day basis, human beings naturally regards [...]

January 22, 2017 // 0 Comments

Back to Black

I’m not saying that I know I’m preaching to the converted but it will come as no surprise to regular visitors to this website that a recurring theme is not nostalgia per se, or indeed any notion that Fings Ain’t Wot They Used Ter Be, but a simple (and some might like to think logical) common [...]

January 16, 2017 // 0 Comments

They didn’t tell me it rains in Palma!

My Friday in Palma constituted what the journos would describe as a ‘slow news day’. For most of the daylight hours it was drizzling and then, from about 5.00pm, the mist rolled in and it really began to rain quite hard. Not something one normally associates with Mallorca because most of us [...]

December 17, 2016 // 0 Comments

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