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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

Barolo and Barberesco

Last night I went to a tasting of the two finest wines of Piedmont – Barbaresco and Barolo.  Both big expensive wines. Piedmont is surrounded by the Alps and almost every vineyard is on a slope. It’s truffle country with hazelnut trees where rice is grown too. The main grape is [...]

October 8, 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

Left Bank of Bordeaux

Last night we tasted the wines of the left bank of Bordeaux. Our tutor began with a lecture on the history of the wine region. 2000 years ago the Romans introduced wine there.  However the real breakthrough came some 1600 years  on. The Dutch irrigated the Medoc basin and Bordeaux started to [...]

September 30, 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

What the doctor said

Throughout the pandemic I have heard very little from doctors on the coal face on how grave the situation is. This is a question I posed to the doctor who gave me a thorough medical yesterday. He said there was far too much ill-informed hype. There were some 70,000 illnesses out there of which [...]

September 26, 2020 // 0 Comments

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