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A lady who lived life to the full

It was announced yesterday that Clarissa Dickson Wright had died, aged 66. Although I shall leave full appreciations of her life to the media obituary writers, I noted that in the piece by Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail today that – according to Who’s Who – her recreations were listed as [...]

March 18, 2014 // 0 Comments

What goes around comes around

This week, battened down in my metaphorical trench dug-out, enduring the snowstorm of incoming centenary WW1 articles, news stories, television and radio programmes, I was reminded that the conflict – at various times described as ‘The Great War’ and ‘the war to end all wars’ – was also [...]

March 15, 2014 // 0 Comments

A glitch a day keeps the listener awake

As a habitual night-owl, I tend to spend the wee hours drinking black coffee whilst sitting at my computer and listening to the radio on my stereo earphones. Just occasionally, on Radio Five Live’s Up All Night [0100 to 0500 hours] show an historic news item breaks … or some unexpectedly [...]

March 12, 2014 // 0 Comments

An interesting taxi ride

My piece today reflects upon a totally unexpected – and therefore shocking – national news story that occurred yesterday morning, albeit coming to my personal attention only at about 10.40am. Unusually, I had spent my breakfast-time listening to neither the radio nor television because [...]

March 12, 2014 // 0 Comments

Drugswatch: horse-racing

At the risk of mounting a one-man crusade, today I am beginning a series of occasional pieces highlighting instances and developments on the general subject of ‘drugs in sport’. By which phrase, I mean everything from detection efforts to performance-enhancing substances, performance-stopping [...]

March 11, 2014 // 0 Comments

On the coast

Yesterday I was in Brighton to see one of my favourite poppets, who is suffering from a flu following a run on the downs in such extreme cold that 2 runners went down with hypothermia. My taxi driver from the station complained of the Green MP Caroline Lucas  and counci, whose leader has the [...]

March 10, 2014 // 0 Comments

Times flies when you’re living life

Yesterday I arrived at my father’s house on the south coast to stay the weekend. At lunchtime, he set off to attend a monthly reunion pub lunch for former members of the Fleet Air Arm, saying he felt an obligation attend because, at the last one, the organiser had remarked “There are so few of [...]

March 8, 2014 // 0 Comments

It’s all right for some …

With advance apologies to those who inhabit it – indeed work hard and have done well for themselves – I hate the insurance industry. As far as I am concerned, the world of insurance is money for old rope. A comfortable modern refuge of a career for those who, not quite intelligent [...]

March 5, 2014 // 0 Comments

The mo-vile phone

When a social historian seeks to identify a sign of our times, I reckon it will be the mobile phone. Walking in a London thoroughfare, it seems one person in three is on the phone and, unlike New York, we do not walk in actual lanes, so as often as not you have to weave out of the way. Few train [...]

March 5, 2014 // 0 Comments

Leave me alone!

As regards ‘junk’ contacts, physical mail has long been overtaken – in my view – by telephone calls. There is nothing in this world more calculated to raise my blood pressure and hackles than the experience of sitting down in my favourite armchair to watch a long-awaited ‘live’ [...]

March 5, 2014 // 0 Comments

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