Category Archives: Uncategorized

Nobody much notices Canada. (Outside Canada, that is.) Its citizens look much like (US) Americans, and sound like them, if you’re not attuned to the subtle differences of dialect. Canadian cities are similar to US ones; a bit cleaner, perhaps, … Continue reading →

There. It’s out. Doesn’t that feel better, David? No more suspicion, no more innuendo; we can all see that you’re clean. Still filthy rich, of course, and so unlikely to be able to empathise with the rest of us; but … Continue reading →

What does it say about me as a person that almost the only pleasure I get from the News nowadays is reading or hearing about the discomfort of people I loathe? (Famous people, that is. I don’t think I loathe … Continue reading →

‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ Or words to that effect. I’ve suddenly remembered that I have sinned too. In 1970 I taught at an American university for a couple of months, and of course received … Continue reading →

It beggars belief that David Cameron ‘holds no shares’, as he claimed the other day, only his official salary and ‘some savings on which I draw some interest’. Everybody of his class holds shares. If Cameron doesn’t now, it’s either because … Continue reading →

David Cameron insists that his tax affairs are ‘a private matter’. That’s when asked whether he is still implicated in the great tax-avoidance scandal that is front-page news today, the ‘Panama Papers’; as we know his grim and arrogant-looking father … Continue reading →

I share most of the usual old farts’ disdain for T20 cricket (for foreign readers, the shortest form of the game, smashing the ball around the ground, with none of the subtlety and artistry of real cricket, the 3-5 day variety); … Continue reading →

This morning Robin Ramsay treated me to a cutting from the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3518400/We-ve-sold-soul-desperate-dash-foreigners-cash-writes-RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN.html); a piece about rich Arab playboys in London, flaunting their gold-painted (or could it be -plated?) Lamborghinis, festooned with unpaid parking tickets, in the streets of … Continue reading →

At first I thought it must be a second April Fool. (I’d already spotted the first one: ‘Royals pick Prince Philip to lead call for UK to say in EU.’ Very amusing.) This one featured Sajid Javid, our Secretary of … Continue reading →

For patriots who base their pride in Britain on her history, the recent collapse of her manufacturing industry should be a heavy blow; much more so than the fall of the Empire, which was never – as I once spent … Continue reading →