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Life

Saying goodbye

Two funerals in the past fortnight for your author and as a direct result therefore also as few reflections upon mortality and life. As it happens, I was attending the first of them – of someone I barely knew – only as a companion to someone else, but yesterday’s farewell was to a formidable [...]

February 10, 2017 // 0 Comments

A la Colthard/Malmaison Brighton and 64 Degrees

I have always been a fan of the Malmaison chain which has done so much to improve hotel standards out of London. I can recall the days when the provincial hotel was about patterned carpets, The Gideon bible, the Corby trouser press and execrable food. The Malmaison began on the Quayside at [...]

February 9, 2017 // 0 Comments

A memorable lunch

Yesterday my brother and I took our father for a visit to where he and his parents used to live in south London between about 1932 and 1939, this before going on for lunch with one of his oldest remaining pals, with whom he had been a prep school before the start of WW2. As is the nature of life [...]

February 8, 2017 // 0 Comments

Coming home to roost

Yesterday as per normal I spent my morning in my favourite arm chair surrounded by the Sunday newspapers and watching BBC1 – viz. The Andrew Marr Show, Nicky Campbell’s The Big Questions and Andrew Neil’s Sunday Politics. It’s a habit that’s hard to break. Something struck me as Nicky [...]

February 6, 2017 // 0 Comments

60th birthday at an iconic venue

Last night I attended the 60th birthday of an old friend held at the Clissold Arms Fortis Green, East Finchley. Not just another local. Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks lived opposite and the first and last musical sessions of the Kinks in 1960 an 1996 were played there. The room where we ate our [...]

February 5, 2017 // 0 Comments

A troubling case

There is no way that you could describe me as a left-winger and – in general terms, partly due to my exposure to pals or acquaintances who have had military experience, and indeed families therefore – I am a respecter of all those who have served their country in uniform. On principle I tend to [...]

February 3, 2017 // 0 Comments

Huddersfield 3 Brighton 1

There is a memorable episode of The Likely Lads when Bob does his best to avoid knowing the result of a match he has recorded. I felt much the same yesterday as I had arranged a dinner with a young executive Melissa whom I mentor at Sussex CCC. I passed a taxi rank near to my home and one of the [...]

February 3, 2017 // 0 Comments

Life is what happens when …

Anyone who keeps an eye on the media stories that flash by every week will be aware that (broadly-speaking) 90% of them cover ‘significant’ world events, another 9% deal with odds and sods of little significance and perhaps the last 1% are gems. Leaving aside for the moment under which [...]

February 3, 2017 // 0 Comments

Holding on by the fingertips

A recurring theme of posts to this website can be filed under the heading ‘Moans About New Technology’. These tend to range from complaints about things that don’t work – or don’t work for oldies – to discourses about whether it is just a fact of life that that the modern world [...]

January 31, 2017 // 0 Comments

Keeping up (or not)

Speaking as someone whose own daughter met her partner via an internet dating site, I have never made any secret of my concern at the direction in which the modern world of technology and omnipresent social media has taken human relations and most particularly sexual ones. I guess it was a sign of [...]

January 29, 2017 // 0 Comments

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