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The Reform Club

I have just returned from three days at the Reform Club. I have gone though various stages. My first was the decision to join made last year after a convivial lunch with a friend member. The accommodation is far cheaper than a West End hotel, the location in Pall Mall convenient and the Sir Charles [...]

January 18, 2024 // 0 Comments

Kennedy, Sinatra and the Mafia (Channel 4)

I’m not a great one for a Channel 4/5 conspiracy documentary which tends to be more speculation to grab the headlines but not bolstered by hard evidence. However this one made a plausible case. This was that Jack Kennedy befriended Frank Sinatra, who arranged glamorous Hollywood film stars for [...]

November 6, 2023 // 0 Comments

An expedition to two National Trust properties

Earlier this year the Boss and I joined the National Trust on a “family ticket”. For many years she had been a member of the organisation and occasional visitor to a variety of its properties. In my case, whilst I had been to a few of them over the past six decades, this was more by informal [...]

September 24, 2023 // 0 Comments

The State – and the state of the country

As life goes on I become more and more progressively unsurprised by anything that ever happens. Common sense, logic, just desserts and the unchanging fundamentals of human existence seem to have become old-fashioned, inappropriate and irrelevant. I was reminded of this week as I trawled through the [...]

August 19, 2023 // 0 Comments

Israel/Daniel Gordis

I have just finished Daniel Gordis’ concise but thorough history of Israel from the time of Zionist Theodore Herzl to the present day. It’s written from the Israeli point of view but aware of the country’s failings and sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. The journey from Herzl to [...]

March 19, 2023 // 0 Comments

Stonehouse

Whilst I enjoyed this three-part series broadcast over 3 nights on ITV, there are two problems with this genre. Firstly, they require not much writing creativity as you already have a story with characters and secondly, how can you differentiate between what is fact and what is faction? Apparently [...]

January 5, 2023 // 0 Comments

My father, NHS & modern medical practice.

It’s always interesting to find something new out about a parent and recently my brother informed me that our father was a founding doctor in the first NHS clinic at Woodberry Down, Hackney – now called the Sir John Scott. Aneurin Bevin, the Labour Minister in Clement Attlee’s government [...]

November 28, 2022 // 0 Comments

Come to think of it, you probably COULD make it up …

One of the catch phrases of the late and great English comic Frankie Howerd (1917-1992) – usually deployed after he’d taken his audience/viewers into his confidence and made some withering, disparaging, remark about some hapless individual that had prompted gales of laughter – was to [...]

October 1, 2022 // 0 Comments

What’s going on?

Two questions that I’ve been asked, as a person with above average financial knowledge and experience, are:- “What’s going on?“ “What should I do?“ The Government does not have the answer to either – and nor do I. Liz Truss’s very public difference with Rishi [...]

September 30, 2022 // 0 Comments

Act of Oblivion/Robert Harris

Critics have hailed Robert Harris’ latest novel as his best since Fatherland.   It’s historical fiction. Charles II, on being restored to the throne, issued a blanket pardon to all who fought for Parliament except those responsible for his father’s death known as the Regicides. Two such [...]

September 13, 2022 // 0 Comments

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