New Month Old Post: First posted 21st March, 2016 A lovely post - I've never read that book, but I seem to remember it being on my parents bookshelf and its long been in the back of my mind to get it. Would be a strong contender for my Dese…
Men and women of a certain age, on finding themselves at a Christian service or funeral, will instantly recognise most of the hymns. They are the privilege who attended the Grammar Schools before Comprehensive Education replaced it around 1…
I graduated in the early 60s. Of my honors degree class two out of 70+ students got firsts. A handful got thirds, the rest between upper and lower seconds. I've been very impressed recently hearing about new graduates with firsts, but now I…
A third post about the Automobile Association. The first two are here and here. Detailed route maps were another service offered by the AA. You can still get them online, but in the 1960s they came in paper booklets setting out your route f…
This is not so much about railways, but about an area I knew well which a railway ran through. I was on the Rawcliffe bus with my mother, looking across the fields at a nearby metal bridge. It was a bright, sunny day, long before I started
Great story! I worry that the people who've grown up in the age of electronic calculators and computers are missing out. We've seen many instances of shop clerks who can't make change when for some reason their electronic cash register fail…
So sorry that you lost your brother so long ago. That's an amazing story about your parents that just shows the resilience of the generation. my mum grew up in a tough agricultural village. I cannot begin to imagine what that must have been…
New month old post: first posted 1st October, 2018 It's rather an attractive theory. What a pity it no longer holds good. I think we realised at the time it was a dodgy theory. Ah, that old embryological parallelism issue again..... I remem…
Economics is something I have never studied, so The Prophets of Profit, a series of five 15-minute programmes on BBC Radio 4, was something of a revelation. For me, it gave new insight into what seems to have gone wrong in corporate Britain…
The Beatles were the soundtrack to my teenage years. I heard Love Me Do on Radio Luxembourg when I was twelve, and their last LP came out when I was twenty. I have two Beatles LPs: the White Album, and Abbey Road, but I had the whole set on…
Some have very good memories for jokes. They can reel them off one after another seemingly for hours. Professional comedians such as Ken Dodd and Bob Monkhouse could keep going all day. On the other hand, I have always struggled to remember…
Words echo through the years. I hear and remember them as if it were today. The written word can be as memorable. Here are some that stayed with me, the ones that come first to mind, which probably say as much about me as their speakers or