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The last time King Richard III went to Leicester, his battered naked corpse was slung face down over a horse and he had a spear shoved up his bottom. Things, I would have thought, could only get better. Unfortunately… The poor King has now suffered a fate worse than horseless death on the butcher’s slab of […]

IT was all going reasonably well until I cut a finger, ramming the digit between a ladder and a rough stone wall. This was neither here nor there. Setbacks like this are commonplace in what passes for my life. Barely ten minutes elapse between each trivial disaster. Each of them amounts to nothing in or […]

IT was International Women’s Day yesterday. For me, the biggest impact was programming on Radio 3 that destroyed my Sunday listening amid a sonic tsunami of squawks, scrapes and bloody Bjork and her Emperor’s-new-clothes mews and howls. Modernist women composers everywhere. God, it was awful. The second biggest impact was flicking through the comments on […]

That’s what comes of living in the past. You forget the present, which is a mercy, and here we are a day late. Fascinating, though, how some preoccupations of the 17th and 18th centuries resembled our own: land acquisition, home improvement, debt. Of course, at a lower level survival was just about all you could […]

I do get cross about righteous indignation. Journalists judging MPs’ morality? Don’t make me laugh. I’ve been a journalist off and on for years and while I myself am a good and deserving person who is kind to animals (apart from cats, which are bastards) I wouldn’t trust many of my colleagues to run a […]

Well, they bred them tough, the children of the 1930s. I suppose when you’ve had to fight for every single tiny thing you’ve ever had – education, food, work, health, even freedom –  you bloody well fight for life, too. If it had been anybody else lying in bed with pneumonia at a frail 86 […]

I’VE been at my sick father’s house, listening anxiously to his ragged breathing, not really knowing quite what to do for the best – much as he must have listened anxiously to my ragged baby breathing, not knowing quite what to do for the best. So the role reversal is now complete. I bundled his […]

LAST night, I did something I haven’t done for a very long time. I went to bed with, well, with a hot water bottle. I’m not ashamed. The bitter wind was howling, and I am banished these days to my lair at the top of the house, where my cosy bed lurks in the corner […]

Part of me hates it when the Left takes a step forward. I’ve believed in fairness and decency all my life, and so I’ve been a socialist all my life (regular readers may have noticed). This has condemned me to years of electoral defeats and setbacks, interspersed, very briefly indeed, with triumphs. For a socialist, […]

There is nothing complicated about a bramble. There it sits, clinging to life, prickles at the ready. Hack and dig and haul and it will yield, but it will take a piece of you with it. Ouch. So on Blue Monday, Brother Weatherman and I did battle with our Sainted Sister’s brambles, and this was […]