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You have to admit … they are clever

On Monday I received a text purportedly from Vodafone that my monthly payment had not gone through and I needed to update my bank details. Suspicious as I hold enough money to cover the payment I forwarded it to my accountant who advised me to ignore the text and contact Vodafone by phone. I was [...]

April 23, 2021 // 0 Comments

The genesis of a song

The creative process of composing a song has always fascinated me. From Schubert to Sheehan some people can compose, most cannot. Some 50 years ago on a family holiday in Rhodes Greece I met the  successful songwriter Peter Callander. His most famous composition was The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde. [...]

April 22, 2021 // 0 Comments

A win-win for nobody?

Like I suspect many sports fans, over the last few days I’ve been watching developments in football’s European Super League debacle at one remove with something like “rubbernecking” fascination. At one remove because I’m not a particular devotee of football – I’ve never been a [...]

April 21, 2021 // 0 Comments

What’s it all about?

My subject for today – illustrated by two examples – is the vexed one of how the human race copes with life on a planet with finite resources on the one hand and apparently infinite complications upon the other. I grant you that’s a hell of an opening statement but there’s no particular [...]

April 17, 2021 // 0 Comments

That all-important second jab

It so happened that yesterday I joined a very British queue. I’d been rung on Tuesday afternoon by someone from my local GP surgery about my second vaccination jab. I’m sure that every GP surgery, pharmacy, NHS “walk in centre” and other unit involved in rolling out the UK’s vaccination [...]

April 16, 2021 // 0 Comments

London impressions

This was my first visit to London to see my dentist. It’s both a painful and expensive process but I assure myself not an ongoing one. I thought the readers might be more interested in my impressions of London in my first visit in just under 6 months. Last there I was struck by the emptiness of [...]

April 15, 2021 // 0 Comments

Back in the real world

Yesterday, for the first time since Monday’s Great Emergence From Lockdown (or “GEFL”), I waddled into my local town high street in the bright sunshine and accompanying still ice-edged bracing wind gusts for little more than just the hell of it. Well, not quite just the hell of it. I needed [...]

April 15, 2021 // 0 Comments

A la Colthard – Claridges & Hush but first the hairdresser

Like so many people my first port of call yesterday was the hairdresser. It had been over 3 months since my last visit and my “ barnet’ was a mass of unruly curly and ends.  Yet it in an odd way I felt more youthful too. My hairdresser had coped with the lockdown well – in some ways its [...]

April 14, 2021 // 0 Comments

Sassicaia and the Super Tuscans

Fashion, as in many things, determines price in wine. In my lifetime I have witnessed Bordeaux, then Bourgogne, then the Supertuscans dominate the fine red wine market. The rise of Sassicaiia from a table wine in the 1970s to £150 per bottle now is a case in point. Its production is far more [...]

April 8, 2021 // 0 Comments

Dubious business practice

On Monday evening, just before my scheduled call with an old pal who is an internet entrepreneur, a message flashed up from my bank on my mobile that £79 had left my account and the payee was Amazon Prime. I could not recall any purchase, nor was there any indication of any in my Amazon accounts [...]

April 7, 2021 // 0 Comments

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