Arts
Postcard From November, Part 2
Happy Birthday to Me My birthday is November 4th and as a child my main memory of it was always of my parents laying on a party for my friends who all turned up bearing [more…]
Arts
Arts
Book Review: Some Fantastic Place – My Life In and Out of Squeeze by Chris Difford
This is the story of Chris Difford, a ne’er-do-well written off as ‘backward’ at school who went on to achieve fame and fortune as the founder and lyricist of the band Squeeze. Squeeze had a [more…]
Arts
1984 & All That
The totalitarian novel is a relatively new genre, the most well known of these being (in no particular order) Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, [more…]
Arts
The Swaling, Part Forty Seven
The Colonel toured Sleescale’s backstreet digs in his battered Transit van picking up our colleagues as if they were black economy workers to be delivered to building sites, cockle beeches or docks. Most of us [more…]
Arts
The Year Turns, Part 4
Ēostre My earliest memories of this time of year involve decorating eggs, going to the local park, and rolling them down a hill. Well, more of a small embankment than a hill, but the thought [more…]
20th Century
A History of Pop Music – Albums 1983
Featured Album: UB40 – Labour of Love This is a series of articles looking at albums from 1960 to whatever year we end up in. I will select a featured album for each year and [more…]
Arts
Always Worth Saying’s Question Time Review
Question Time 18th March 2021 Panel: Victoria Atkins (Conservative) Jess Phillips (Labour) Kirsten Oswald (SNP) Mark Carney (Former Bank of England governor) Ian Hislop (Editor and broadcaster) Venue: London, East Renfrewshire and Ottowa The first [more…]
Arts
Postcard From November, Part 1
Happy Birthday to Me My birthday is November 4th and as a child my main memory of it was always of my parents laying on a party for my friends who all turned up bearing [more…]
Drinking
My First Foreign Holiday
I left school in July 1966 and started work as an apprentice in that September. I didn’t earn a lot of money but I did manage to save a little in the Bradford and Bingley [more…]