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Friday, 19 September 2014

Poetry: what is it? Buggered if I know. Then there is a sad, sad tale: my comments on the Scottish referendum are lost forever. And a cheap solution to an eternally pressing problem

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For a man of my pretensions, it is hugely embarrassing to admit that ‘poetry’, or at least, modern poetry, not only passes me by, but leaves...
Thursday, 18 September 2014

The taxman, as always, cometh (though, I notice, dragging his knuckles along the ground). Trouble is I don’t have the dosh to buy Dave Hartnett a spiffing lunch*

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OK, so I might be going on 92 - oh, all right then, 103 - but I still cross my fingers that I have not yet become one of those irritating je...
Tuesday, 16 September 2014

The Scots go for broke – makes sense. The English discover they ‘love the United Kingdom’. Really? But what the hell: it’s the middle of the fence for me

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Will they, won’t they? Well, apparently, according to Radio 4’s ‘flagship’ programme Today, even the Chinese are holding their breath about ...
Saturday, 13 September 2014

More on John O’Hara: a critique from someone or other and my response to it

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Tonight I was just about to sit down with the end of a bottle of Pernod (a great drink if you like aniseed and don’t believe all the guff th...
Wednesday, 10 September 2014

Why this ‘newspaperman’ is not in the slightest embarrassed not to be regarded as a ‘newspaperman’. Chuffed, in fact; or to put it another way: fuck deadlines, embrace discipline. Then there’s why John O’Hara deserves to be better known, at least as well as once he was

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This entry needs (and will get) a rewrite. Well, I’m doing the honourable thing, the thing that has to be done on any last day of a holida...
Monday, 8 September 2014

Pound plummets, stocks plummet, economy in dire straights: why? Well, the Scots might well – perhaps - en masse tell Perfidious Albion to take a running jump

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Las Albadas: Year three, fourth day. Well into my week of doing nothing and caring even less about it. Nothing much to report, really, exc...
Sunday, 7 September 2014

In praise of John O’Hara, an apparently forgotten American writer who could write the pants of many past and present

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I think I’ve mentioned the American writer John O’Hara in this blog before, or perhaps I haven’t. But I am about to do so now. I had never...
Saturday, 6 September 2014

A first dispatch . . . (with some pictures)

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Las Albadas: Year Three, second day. Pleasant as always. I was a tad indiscrete (or ‘indiscreet’ – subs please check as at this point I ca...
Sunday, 31 August 2014

Fuck it up: BMW shows you how. And talking of fuck ups (fucks up?), we still have no idea what is going on in Eastern Ukraine. What we do know is that the EU is getting pretty flabby about it all, now push is coming to shove. But then what do I know?

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The conventional, and probably correct, wisdom is that German car makers are good on the technology, but bloody useless at design. That migh...