19th Century
Sit Down At Your Computer
QWERTY – Why? Sit down at your computer (or typewriter) and type a few lines. You can work out your speed and efficiency fairly easily – you have a rough knowledge of where the keys [more…]
Month: April 2020
Fiction
The Butcher Began To Kill The Ox, Ch 2
CHAPTER 2 Now, here he was, sitting in an anonymous government office, waiting to be grilled by what he had always described as “faceless farts” of civil servants who wouldn’t do his job for all [more…]
Arts
Amazon’s Dirty Tricks: When the BBC Calls
Readers of this website might have heard about my recently published critique of the BBC, ‘The Fake News Factory: Tales from BBC-land’ a fruity and occasionally witty expose of the UK’s thoroughly dishonest state propaganda [more…]
Authoritarianism
The Great Confinement
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. C.S. Lewis Greetings [more…]
Fiction
Joe Malone, Part Fifty-Seven
Then I saw that almost concealed between the two uniformed officers had been Vanessa. Her slight frame easily masked by their bigger bulk. They all reached the car at the same time as a single [more…]
Economics
A Parable for Our Time
One of my fondest books as a child was Doctor at Timberline, by Charles Fox Gardiner. Gardiner was a doctor early in the settlement of western Colorado in the nineteenth century. Each chapter of the [more…]
Arts
Just a matter of trust
We are all currently sliding on a well greased mat, guided by the cavernous walls and twisted pathways of the ponderous helter-skelter of fate, rapidly descending into oblivion. Any reasonable or sane individual will by [more…]
Cooking
A Retro Sausage Extravaganza
Another from my Mum’s collection of cut out and keep from the Woman’s Friend, back of a sauce packet or wherever she picked it up from. Takes about 25 minutes faffing, 45 minutes to cook. [more…]
19th Century
Can lost production ever be recovered?
It’s easy to blame Covid-19 virus for the nation’s woes and, up to a point, that’s understandable. People who focus exclusively on the nation’s health tend to pay less attention to the economic damage wrought [more…]