Just in

Blogs

Book review (a curate’s egg)

I bought Robert Colls’ new book This Sporting Life: Sport & Liberty in England, 1760-1960 about three months ago after both reading a review of it in one of the Sunday newspapers and having it recommended to me by a pal because of my general interest in boxing and its forebear – [...]

October 21, 2020 // 0 Comments

London: it’s eerie

Yesterday I travelled to London for various meetings. A taxi took me to my first appointment via Oxford St. – I have never seen it so deserted. If I had to describe the West End pre-Covid I would use the word bustling. Now it would be eerie. It was like those nightmarish science fictions [...]

October 15, 2020 // 0 Comments

Six months and counting into it

Last weekend I joined an informal and thoroughly enjoyable Zoom meeting of half a dozen erstwhile contributors to the Rust – two of whom I have never met in the flesh – at which we just socialised, caught up with each other’s personal news and discussed the extent to which the Covid-19 crisis [...]

October 13, 2020 // 0 Comments

Facing the facts

It fascinates me how the human race always presumes in the present that life as it is will never change and yet simultaneously also manages to embrace the new – technology, fashion, media obsessions, medical breakthroughs et al. – as it comes along with varying degrees of enthusiasm ranging [...]

October 12, 2020 // 0 Comments

Zoom or bust

I suspect a year ago few had head heard of Zoom, now it is an indispensable communication tool. It may be indispensable but it is not enjoyable. I do not pretend to be any sort of art expert but perhaps its the mercantile in me that makes Dutch art in its  golden age in the sixteenth century my [...]

October 9, 2020 // 0 Comments

A strange thing indeed

The sport of road racing version of professional cycling – absolute pinnacle in the minds of sports fans generally around the globe the Tour de France – has long had a relationship (or indeed a series of them) with the murky dark waters of performance-enhancing drug taking. The former [...]

October 7, 2020 // 0 Comments

We are a grandfather!

Sometimes privately I liken my existence as akin to being a passenger in a second class railway carriage of a runaway express hurtling along a toy Hornby Double-Oh track, with the countryside, hills, animals, hamlets, towns and people whizzing past (relative to the train) and – as they do – [...]

October 6, 2020 // 0 Comments

Where we are now (again)

For those of us who love it, the world of sport as an industry and pastime that has been affected at least as badly as any other during the coronavirus pandemic crisis. In an universe of infinite amounts of unknows and uncertainty – like all species – the human race craves fixed points, [...]

October 3, 2020 // 0 Comments

Another update from the front line

Regular Rusters will be familiar with my particular life story whereby, after playing a lot of sport (to a very average standard I should add) in my youth, I took up playing rugby again just for the joy of it in my thirties … later ruptured an Achilles tendon in my official “retirement match” [...]

October 2, 2020 // 0 Comments

My not-so sporting weekend (so far)

Come the weekend and no doubt like many sport (but not betting) obsessed Brits yesterday I set my cable television controls for the Sky and BT channels – and, to be fair, also for the BBC1’s Football Focus with  Dan Walker – in search of something entertaining and/or diverting to watch. [...]

September 27, 2020 // 0 Comments

1 … 141 142 143 144 145 … 350

Copyright © 2026 The National Rust | Design by Premonition