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New Fitness campaign – Day One

With my GFC (great fitness campaign) having become a Covid-19 pandemic victim last summer – since when, apart from occasional long walks, I have failed to indulge in any serious bout of exercise-taking – my plan from today is to gradually crank up my general state of fitness until I [...]

March 22, 2021 // 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

There’s a lot going on when you think about it …

Within ten minutes or so of waking and coming to my computer today in order to tour the websites of those few UK newspaper websites still permitting free access to their pages, two things struck me. Firstly, that in the 24 hours since I had last conducted said exercise there had been a considerable [...]

September 9, 2020 // 0 Comments

Upholding the right not to pay for something twice

Today – and in doing so possibly in a cool ‘post-modern’ manner raising profound issues over the media edifice of artifice that dominates how we view art, marketing and fashion – I am revealing to Rusters how most days I educate myself about what is going on in the world. It’s not exactly [...]

July 10, 2020 // 0 Comments

Going ‘off piste’ for a moment

One of the Rust’s engaging features to my mind – consistent with comments made by many of its readers that write to me – is its unique and somewhat haphazard approach to its mission. I’ve lost count of those I fall into conversation with – especially those with connections to marketing [...]

June 22, 2020 // 0 Comments

Sad and inconvenient truths

Life, as an elderly uncle commented the other day, joshing me gently with a black-humoured chuckle, is a terminal disease. The notion is not incompatible with the principle that all lives are equally important. Amidst the continuing media storm over the Government’s handling of the [...]

May 15, 2020 // 0 Comments

Hahah! Don’t believe everything you read in the media

Those in the traditional newspaper and television industry around the world – never mind dedicated online news sites and the big battalions of social media which daily push out clips, rumours, fake news items and hilarious You’ve Been Framed-type “fails’ and cock-ups, any of [...]

May 5, 2020 // 0 Comments

Infamy, infamy … they’ve all got it in for me

Today I can report – from the front line of a sixty-something’s quest for fitness – that I returned to the gym last night for the first time in three weeks in the pouring rain and managed twenty minutes on an exercise bike and a cursory tour of the weights area before returning home [...]

March 10, 2020 // 0 Comments

A Day at the Races

Yesterday our Players Club of Sussex CCC organised a day out at Plumpton races. Always curious to enjoy a new sporting experience I went along. Plumpton is near Lewes in the fold of the South Downs. Sussex is blessed with racecourses. Aside from Plumpton, there are Brighton, Fontwell and the [...]

February 11, 2020 // 0 Comments

Salvation is at hand!

I’m cueing in the classic late 19th Century black spiritual When The Saints Go Marching In here because I’m exhilarated and frankly feel like it: See here for all-time great Louis Armstrong – regarded as one of its finest ever exponents – taking it at a sedate pace as only he was able on a [...]

January 31, 2020 // 0 Comments

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Thoughts on the European Super League

April 20, 2021 // 0 Comments

If nothing else the proposed European Super League (ESL) of the major clubs of England, Italy and Spain has done something unique: united the disparate and diverse elements [...]
The Tanner Report: Arsenal 1 Fulham 1

April 19, 2021 // 0 Comments

To concede a goal late in the 7th minute of extra time is gut-wrenching but, when it costs you the final lifeline of survival, doubly so. Had we won we would have closed the [...]
A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Family Way (1966)

April 18, 2021 // 0 Comments

A Touch of Honey is based on a Shelagh Delaney play which she wrote when just eighteen. It’s set in the industrial landscape of Salford and was the first and acclaimed [...]
County championship woes

April 17, 2021 // 0 Comments

The county cricket championship is under way and Sussex CCC have the thin end of the bat. The mini league format of the last Covid-stricken season was re-adopted with Sussex [...]
What’s it all about?

April 17, 2021 // 0 Comments

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 [...]