Just a scratch
“Fatty . . . Fami . . . Fatma . . .?” calls out a croaky voice, its tone honed over many years byNo.6 cigarettes or a similar brand.A lady gets up from her chair and offers her form to the woman with...
View ArticleOverkill
A PCR type of test costs about £150. If I go to visit Olga in Ukraine as things stand at the moment I will have to purchase a test before I can fly back and then two more during my period of...
View ArticleRepeat after me: I am definitely going to die but probably not for some...
For many months now I have been doing my weekly shop at Tesco in Towcester early on a Saturday morning. This avoided the necessity of queueing and, more recently, with queueing not being required, also...
View ArticleOne year later: at last, a little freedom.
A few days ago most of the legal restrictions on our behaviour here in England were withdrawn. Some shops and premises may still ask us to wear a facemask but the social distancing, rules about how...
View ArticleDriving has just got really scary.
This year there will be a lot of very rich families or relatives of squished pedestrians or cyclists.I think most drivers will recognise the occasions when they have most closely smashed into the rear...
View ArticleUkraine. What happens next?
To answer many questions regarding this, how it affects us, my wife's citizenship, what happens etc., is not easy. But I'll try.Initially I had written outlining what I reckoned would be the most...
View ArticleThe lady doth protest too much, methinks.
A colleague sent me a link to a poll type of thing regarding the request by the United States for the United Kingdom to extradite Julian Assange. The general gist was to ask Boris and Priti Patel to...
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Ukraine, nearly two months later . . .
In my previous post I noted how I had learned that Ukraine men would fight and not give up easily but, nevertheless, expected that, by now an unpleasant situation would have arisen with Russia trying...
View ArticleHe, she or it. 517 School Policies. This is Britain in 2022.
Something's gone wrong in this country. I think it has also gone wrong in many other parts of the world too but I can only write about the one I live in. There are now 517 officially recommended...
View ArticleFour months later. It is still wrong.
It's been four months and three days since Russia began the destruction of Ukraine. As several military experts predicted, Russia has managed to take effective control of a band of Ukraine stretching...
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Keep taking those iodine tablets . . .
There was something very satisfying about the news of a bridge being blown up today. It was also quite surprising and I am pretty sure it has taken many people by surprise, even those who claim to...
View ArticleGreen And Pleasant Land Matters
A few years ago this was a happy place with amusing articles and pictures of life in the village. I am so sorry that it has turned into my series of log-winded moans about what is happening in the...
View ArticleHelp. Let's have more HI. Less AI.
Help. A little assistance with a query about a service or product. It doesn't seem much to ask but try getting someone to respond in any meaningful way to a problem these days. In recent weeks I have...
View ArticleThe Nuclear Elephant in the Room
So that's the end of 2022!What a year. At the beginning of the year I was in Ukraine. I remember walking back in -20°C temperatures after an evening of celebration with friends who lived in Zhytomyr...
View ArticleWho will rescue Britain from the Woke Brigade?
Here are in 2023 and it's time to put this country to rights now. The Conservative government have really let us down, in my view, over the last few years. And I am normally a pretty passionate...
View ArticleMaths and the NHS
I don't know who is now advising Rishi Sunak. James Forsyth has recently transferred from The Spectator to his political team and I had previously been impressed with his writing and argument when...
View ArticleTo my German friend . . .
My friend in Germany wrote to me wondering whether his country should agree to send tanks to Ukraine, believing that it would simply lead to even more deaths and he was scared that a result might also...
View ArticleThere will be trouble ahead . . .
That's the question many people are asking and, quite honestly, no-one knows. Some excellent writers who really do seem to know what they're talking about in The Spectator see a kind of stalemate...
View ArticleA Different World
It's becoming a very strange world and quite the opposite of what I had expected in one particular way. One would have thought that the internet would have provided free transmission and sharing of...
View ArticleThe infinite beauty of the impossibly real.
I am trying to imagine what it must be like to be intelligent and kind-natured and living in Russia, born and bred there - a good person who somehow manages to discover and be aware of the facts as to...
View ArticleComplete and utter nonsense. A stupid, pointless invasion continues.
And so it goes on. Here we are in late June 2023, a year and a half since Russia started killing people in Ukraine for no apparent reason that anyone has adequately explained to me. The total...
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Just what is Palestine?
I wish I had paid more attention in History and Geography classes at school. If you asked me to draw an outline of Israel, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Jordan . . I would get none of them right. I...
View ArticleOne war might end another
I felt I had to write about what is happening in and around Israel in my last article. I felt that I should support Israel but I think like many people I wasn't too sure that Israel was good and Hamas...
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Latvia: a few days in October
One of the first things you notice about Latvia is that you can see a long way, there are lots of trees, usually in the distance and everything is very clean and tidy.They also like green, and odd...
View ArticleIndex Librorum Prohibitorum
The University of Cambridge’s national library has been accused of blacklisting books in a “sinister, Orwellian and alarming” new decolonisation drive, after officials asked lecturers to flag...
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