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Pride of Price?

Last weekend was Pride weekend which attracted 300,000 visitors to Brighton but is not universally accepted as A Good Thing by us residents. It’s impossible to cross Brighton because of road closures. The celebrants leave litter and worse, then some clog up the A & E dept as the cavorting [...]

August 7, 2024 // 0 Comments

Who Only Cricket Knows/David Woodhouse

This is a book prize-winning account of the 1953-1954 tour to the Caribbean led by Len Hutton and managed by Charles Palmer. The title is an adaptation from Rudyard Kipling by the Marxist writer C.R James which reflected one of the tensions of the tour – nascent Caribbean nationalism – [...]

July 31, 2024 // 0 Comments

A passenger on a train

Yesterday I was travelling back by train to my home town from Victoria. An attractive woman placing her case on a rack sat temporarily next to me and then moved. Initially I was hopeful of her company but grateful subsequently she sat elsewhere. She got on her mobile phone to reveal the latest [...]

July 18, 2024 // 0 Comments

The Rumor Game/Thomas Mullen

The Rumor Game is set in Boston in 1943 and features as central characters a Jewish activist journalist (Anne) and an Irishman (Devon Mulroy) who works for the FBI. Both are conflicted. Anne wants to be more involved in exposing rising anti-semitism, chiefly inflicted by the Irish community, and [...]

March 27, 2024 // 0 Comments

More Daphne du Maurier/Radio 4 drama

The second Daphne du Maurier dramatisation by Paula O’Shea on Radio 4 (broadcast yesterday) was not an adaptation of one of her stories but rather a chance meeting late in Daphne’s life on one of her coastal Cornwall walks between her – played excellently by Helena Bonham Carter – [...]

March 7, 2024 // 0 Comments

All The Light We Cannot See/Anthony Doerr

For those who do not enjoy reading, or may be intimidated by a 500 page book, you can start – as I did – with the Netflix film starring Mark Ruffalo and Hugh Laurie. I was sufficiently engaged – and thought the film may not have done justice to the novel – to read the book. [...]

March 5, 2024 // 0 Comments

The Glass Pearls/Emeric Pressburger

This novel is absorbing but troubling. The writer Emeric Pressburger was a distinguished film maker who, with Michael Powell, made such classics as Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus and A Matter of Life and Death. He wrote this novel in the 1960s and it has just been republished by Faber. The subject [...]

February 3, 2024 // 0 Comments

The decline & demise of José Mourinho

Last week José Mourinho was sacked from AS Roma. After his time at Chelsea, Inter Milan, Real Madrid and Manchester United he moved down a level to Tottenham Hotspur and Roma. Now where? He has not managed PSG nor Barcelona, nor AC Milan, but more likely he will take over the Portuguese national [...]

January 24, 2024 // 0 Comments

The state of England rugby union – Woodward has a ten point plan

I must begin today by declaring an interest that, despite his illustrious rugby union playing career as a centre threequarters (21 caps for England) and, of course, his subsequent stint as England head coach which culminated in the historic 2003 England Rugby World Cup victory in Australia, I am [...]

December 30, 2023 // 0 Comments

West Wittering outing

On Wednesday I organised a day trip of Rusters to Bob Tickler’s beach hut on West Wittering beach. The trip was organised some time ago and of course –  when the day arrived – Storm Gerrit was on its way. A cricketer turned successful artist friend of Alice’s is painting a [...]

December 29, 2023 // 0 Comments

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