20th Century
A Passenger’s Tale
How it all began Not long after our new neighbours Ernie and Maisie Allen moved in next door, my wife and I were invited to join them and a group of their friends for drinks [more…]
Tom Pudding
Hobbies
How to tackle the Going Postal crossword
Introduction When I started work for the local council in 1964, I shared an office with a secretary, the high point of whose life seemed to be the arrival of the monthly NALGO newspaper which [more…]
Engineering
“And what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Introduction It is interesting that in Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ when Reg , the leader of The People’s Front of Judaea, poses that question the very first response he receives from his gang of [more…]
20th Century
A Massacre of the Innocents
Introduction On Saturday 10 June, 1944, while heading north towards Normandy to help counter the Allied D-Day invasion, German troops of the Der Führer Regiment of the SS Panzer Division Das Reich, committed an unthinkable [more…]
Health
It started with a piss – Part Three
Introduction In Parts 1 and 2 I told the tale of how a routine scan as part of an investigation into a urinary tract infection had revealed a large (63mm) abdominal aortic aneurysm (Triple A) [more…]
19th Century
A Labour of Love
Introduction Hidden away in the heart of France’s Drôme region about 50km south of Lyon is a little known yet magnificently eccentric example of naïve architecture that is well worth a detour or, in my [more…]
Health
It started with a piss – Part Two
First off, aorta explain that the above pun doesn’t really work when the blood vessel that is the subject of these articles is an artery and not a vein but try as I will, I [more…]
Health
It started with a piss
I don’t know why, but for me medical problems always seem to occur at the most inconvenient times possible, usually on a Saturday evening. And so it was one Saturday in late October 2019 when [more…]
20th Century
An Afternoon at the Sammy Miller Motorcycle Museum
Although we moved from Yorkshire to the South Coast 38 years ago and despite living only two miles from his premises in New Milton, I had only once previously visited Sammy Miller’s wonderful motorcycle museum [more…]