"Five score and one posts ago my father's son brought forth on this medium a new blog...." I could continue with the topical parody (last Tuesday marked 150 years since the original), but you get the picture, so I won't. 100 posts is a time for reflection. It was my wife who encouraged me to give…
Dallas, Taxus
According to a study in the influential "British Medical Journal", if you are looking for a safe profession (leaving aside Accountant or Lawyer), you would be better advised to plump for Bomb Disposal Expert or Formula 1 Racing Driver than Soap Opera Star. The BMJ informs us that characters in these B-TV sagas have three times the…
Shooting at goal
I love municipal elections. Two weeks ago the incumbent mayor of my sleepy town (population 70,000 - the locals insist on calling it a city even though they would not fill Wembley Stadium) was lawnmowered into political oblivion by his predecessor, who decided to stand for the only apparent reason that he could not think of anything better to…
Tax that must not be named
Standing in the Great Hall of Hogwarts one day this summer in the company of my youngest son and half of the picture-popping population of Japan, I was the only muggle who, when asked by the Warner Brothers Studio Guide which House I would want the Sorting Hat to direct me to, did not reply Gryffindor. To my…
Brave New World?
When, at 3 o'clock on the morning of September 30 , I flopped, bleary-eyed, into a chair in a Berlin hotel room, activated my laptop and started to write about John Le Carre's Cold War Trilogy, it did not occur to me that the ensuing post was to be the beginning of my (first) trilogy. The story so far: A…
Going Back To Sunday School
If challenged to a game of Word Association, top of my list of responses to "Berlin" would not be "Morality"; in fact it would be hard-pressed to make it as high as the bottom of my list. Dietrich (The Blue Angel), Liza with a Zee (Cabaret) and Political Movement with a Zee (every war movie between…
Obama, Join The Circus!
I read everything that John Le Carre ever wrote until he, like Paul Simon, went African. His Cold War novels had me chained to the page. Who could forget the very end of the Quest for Karla Trilogy as Smiley's People, the last in the series, draws to a close? Spoiler Alert - you may be about to…
What’s in a name?
The first poem I studied in secondary school began: "The pig lay on a barrow dead, motionless". Poet Laureate Ted Hughes' ensuing nine sickeningly graphic, non-rhyming stanzas made me want to vomit and scuppered any chance that Wordsworth, Byron or Shelley might offer the key to my romantic soul. It was not surprising, therefore, that the death of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney a…
Reindeer in the headlines
Oslo is not the capital of Sweden, and that nice King Harald, who has his photograph taken once a year handing out coveted prizes to clever people, is not the King of Sweden. Harald is King of Norway, which is just as well really as he lives in Oslo which is the capital of Norway (and…
Georgia on my mind
When, on August 16, I saw the announcement that Bert Lance had died, memories of the disappointments of that period of my life known as "coming-of-age" came flooding back. Lance was a Georgian banker (born 82 years ago a little closer to Atlanta than Tbilisi) who took the train up from the South to Washington when Jimmy (pronounced Jimmuh)…
Tax Break 