Hobbies
Crossword No. 127
First correct entry out of ‘the hat’ wins a GP mug. Email entries to me by 6.00 pm Sunday, subject ‘Crossword’. Contact here on email Last week’s winner. 126 bogblaster. Answers with next week’s crossword. [more…]
Blog
Arts
A Glass Half Full
In a previous article, I asked whether you had ever gazed into your pint and wondered about the beginnings of beer and brewing. This time, I’ll ask you another question. It’s about the pint pot [more…]
Arts
Postkarte aus Bochum (Woanders ist auch Scheiße)
Herbert Grönemeyer made this town a whole lot more famous with his 1984 album “4630 Bochum”. More of Herr G later, but where, I hear some of you ask, is this magical place of which [more…]
Business
Reform & Real Reform
Those of us struggling to get a grip on Chancellor Sunak’s latest relief-measures should note the terminology. He seeks to revive the Covid-stricken economy with a series of tax “giveaways”. When anyone in government talks [more…]
Arts
My Apprenticeship, Part Two
Part one went through the first two years of my drawing office apprenticeship with Babcock and Wilcox Ltd. During the second year, Babcock and Wilcox Ltd became Babcock and Wilcox (Operations) Limited. The first of [more…]
20th Century
An early airman’s tragic adventure
Early 1930: It had been a depressing English winter – cold, dark and wet for weeks on end. In West Wickham, a young man who had left Australia five years earlier and settled here in [more…]
History
The Brown Bull Hotel
In the eighties I worked as a Home Office representative in Immigration Tribunal Appeals in London. We were a team of ordinary civil servants and were pitted against solicitors, barristers, silks, practitioners with an agenda. [more…]
Fiction
War Crimes Chapter 16 – The Little Girl from Derby
War Crimes Chapter 16 Afarin Khan had never been blessed with the type of cleverness required to ingest, sift, collate and then regurgitate information onto an examination paper. If anything as far as the British [more…]
Animals
Larry’s Diary Week Forty Nine
Monday Another week and another chance for me to comment on some of the happenings in Westminster and around the world. I did see one thing that made me purr over the weekend. It was [more…]