After happening upon some sad news at the breakfast table the other morning, I sighed, folded my newspaper and gazed wistfully out of the window across the frost-pinched meadows of my native Debatable Lands. Beyond [more…]
Great Uncle Wally introduced me to Guinness. Well, to be fair Mackeson, its slightly sweeter cousin. A stout more adapted to the tastes of your average seven-year-old. Those regular Sunday trips during the late 60s [more…]
The second-ever greatest Johnson of words, Samuel, the 18th-century lexicographer, informs us, “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life”. Three centuries later, no matter what we think of life we’re [more…]
My dad was one of eight brothers. The oldest of these, born in 1915, was called David. I can remember him from the 1950s but he was always a bit distant, a bit odd in [more…]
The “Deutsches Afrikakorps” (DAK) were formed in 1941 after the failure of the Italian defence of their North African colonies against the British advance in Operation “Compass”. The Germans sent out the DAK, initially composed [more…]
On one of AWS’s recent informative pieces on Scotland, he mentioned Waverley Station in Edinburgh and I mentioned in the comments (which nobody reads) that perhaps the most versatile civil servant ever, John Anderson, took [more…]
The 20th of October 1964 saw the birth of Kamala Iyer Harris at Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California, a daughter to accomplished academics Shyamala and Donald Harris. Shyamala was already a PhD in nutrition [more…]
They say you should never meet your heroes. Is this a recent phenomenon? Certainly, you’d be advised to make an excuse and leave if you think a chief constable is about to enter the room. [more…]
Just before 2000, I decided to give up a well-paid job and comfortable life in Japan to make a new start in my homeland. I had bought a share in a house in south London, [more…]
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