One night a couple of weeks ago I met up with an old school chum and his wife visiting for the holidays. Over one of those multi-coloured salads that replaced steak and chips as the late-night staple round about the same time our hair went grey, he mentioned that, just before coming away, eighty friends had joined him for a birthday…
Funeral Blues
Margaret Hilda Thatcher. She will always be Margaret Hilda Thatcher to me. You see, for well over a hundred years now, when the English have entered Polling Booths to vote in a General Election, they have in the main been faced with 3 candidates - Conservative, Labour and Liberal (or hyphenated Liberal or hyphenated Labour or…
Losing Marx
"Another decade is traveling through, and I’m here, and you are there." Growing up in England, I was always taught that showing emotion was a weakness. So, as I read the above line in the New York Times the other day a fleck of dust must have popped into my eye and made it, and its twin,…
It takes two to tango
Apart from the snow-white attire, it could have been, quite literally, two Old Joes getting together for Saturday lunch and a chinwag. Joseph Ratzinger and Jorge Bergoglio made history at the Castel Gandolfo outside Rome last week when, for the first time in at least 600 years, two popes met face to living face. Watching their rather wooden performances before the cameras (neither…
What a clever big country!
If you worked in the financial sector in the 1980s, odds-on you were classified as either a YUPPIE (Young Upwardly-Mobile Professional), a DINKY (Dual Income No Kids Yet) or a LOMBARD (Lots Of Money But A Right Richard Nixon). As I fell short on at least one letter of each of those acronyms I escaped…
Of the people, by the people, for the people
In the early days of my marriage an ageing, newly acquired relative informed me that - other than the price - there was no difference between Johnnie Walker and Tesco's no-frills, own-brand blended whisky. The market survey was not long in coming when, the following weekend, a visitor involuntarily sprayed the contents of a freshly…
Roman Circus
"He is not the Messiah, he is a very naughty boy". Thus spake Mandy Cohen, mother of Brian, to the ignorant mob besieging her home, rejecting their mindless veneration of her son. Her statement would have been appropriate at many points in history - the world has had no shortage of false messiahs. The human condition…
Men in Sepia
When larger than life Oscar winner Orson Welles was asked why there had been a self-destructive theme running through his career, he replied that he was like the scorpion who begged the frog to carry him across the river on his back. When the frog hesitated, fearing that the scorpion would bite him, the scorpion…
Holy smoke
On Tuesday I was asked to review a generic letter to clients that had been "professionally" translated from Hebrew to English. Wielding my red pen with the hungry anticipation of a famished vampire, I proceeded to correct just about everything on the page except the spaces between the paragraphs. Not being able to resist the kind…
Tax Wars: The Authorities Strike Back
Suicide is not a laughing matter. Last week marked fifty years since American poet, Sylvia Plath, took her own life, and the benefit-of-hindsight news stories on the subject were uniformly depressing. It is interesting, therefore, that one of the most successful comedy series in television history opened each week with a song about suicide. Thirty years ago…
Tax Break 