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Phew! What a Scorcher!

One of my regular purchase these last fifty years has been Private Eye the satirical magazine founded in 1961 by amongst others comedian Peter Cook, Andrew Osmond and Peter Usbourne. I’m a firm believer in turning over every proverbial stone and exposing the shady dealings, inconsistencies, [...]

May 22, 2019 // 0 Comments

Amsterdam arrived and analysed

We actually made up the time after being given an earlier than anticipated slot. Schipol airport is a confusing, crowded place as you have to get past the flows of passengers making their way to departure gates. After clearing border control and customs there was no driver as arranged at the [...]

May 21, 2019 // 0 Comments

Amsterdam Bound

When Alice Mansfield informed us she was off to Amsterdam to see the Rembrandt Exhibition at the Rijskmuseum she soon found ready takers with Daffers, Bob Tickler and myself. I was left to deal with the travel arrangements and sitting on board a BA flight and being informed there is an hour and [...]

May 20, 2019 // 0 Comments

Suddenly a flash from the past

I spent the weekend on the south coast, spending time with my 93-year old father and his current residential carer. He’s currently on reasonable form as it happens though, as is the nature of these things, he’s on a path from which you never get back to being your former self. One of the [...]

May 20, 2019 // 0 Comments

No change there, then?

These days the comedian Frankie Howerd has – as is sometimes the lot of showbiz people with a particular persona or style – somewhat fallen out of fashion and I doubt that anyone under the age of forty has ever heard of him. There was even a period in the late 1950s and early 1960s [...]

May 17, 2019 // 0 Comments

Days in the sun – and then another yesterday

To Brighton yesterday by train for a gathering of old friends for nothing more important than a thoroughly enjoyable lunch in the unexpectedly hot bright sunshine in an establishment overlooking the marina. It is in the nature of human existence that stuff constantly happens, paths differ, fortunes [...]

May 15, 2019 // 0 Comments

Jason Bowyer

I was shocked to learn, in reading the brochure of the forthcoming New English Exhibition, a group of which he was once President and founded its Drawing School, of the death of Jason Bowyer. I knew Jason for most of his life and his oil painting of Walberswick is hanging on my wall as I write [...]

May 14, 2019 // 0 Comments

Positive action doesn’t always match reality

[I am putting on my tin hat as I begin this post …] From time to time on this organ our contributors pass comment upon the domination of the media by ‘right-on’ PC-driven campaigners, in ‘equality for all’ mode, demanding greater representation in all areas of UK life [...]

May 13, 2019 // 0 Comments

Life is what happens to you when you’re busy doing other things

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man of my vintage – over 65 – desirous of undertaking a physical fitness campaign [to begin by borrowing a quotation from Jane Austen, but then making it relevant to the 21st Century] will be beset, not only by literal and metaphorical [...]

May 11, 2019 // 0 Comments

A la Colthard/ Le Colombier

Le Colombier restaurant in Dovehouse Street, just behind the Royal Marsden Hospital, is the sort of place where I would meet my Great Aunt Julie. You know the sort: bowl of pot pourri in the hallway; favourite playwright Noel Coward; favourite music Gilbert and Sullivan; voted leave to stem the [...]

May 10, 2019 // 0 Comments

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