I had virtually erased Boundary Hall from my memory until, a few weeks ago when I drove past it to see that it is now a large Cala Homes housing development. Coincidentally, just a few days later, it (Boundary Hall) came up in conversation with my friend Steve, whose wife once worked at the AWE (Atomic Weapons Establishment) nearby, as did I briefly, before escaping its clutches. For those of you who have never heard of Boundary Hall, it was a ...
I went to a funeral yesterday and as funerals go, it was a jolly nice one, where being overtly sombre was not really on the agenda. For a lot of blokes of my generation and indeed the generations above, we have it in our DNA to try to keep emotions in check at these events, wrongly seeing that blubbing is a sign of a weakness in our characters. Fortunately, yesterday, apart from having to fake an early season hay-fever attack half-way through ...
Someone asked me the other day if, as a single parent, I could relate to the McDonalds advert where a man is trying to ingratiate himself to a difficult teenage lad who is struggling to come to terms with him moving in to his house? The simple answer is no on several counts. First of all, I have no interest in McDonald's food and secondly, I wouldn't start plying it to a child who I may be potentially living with for the next ten years. I ...
My life with domestic pets has, at best, been a chequered one. I have owned lots of pets but generally ones that have the brain span of the Chelsea FC "Benitez baiters" who are soiling the name of this great sporting nation with their witless, Neanderthal like protests against the "interim manager" of their football club.
My first animal was a Guinea pig, the obligatory maiden domestic pet of a small child, it is an animal that seems to live ...
I often wonder how a country where the weather can be so grey and unforgiving could possibly have been responsible for so many exports around the world. This island, cut off in the North Sea, has been responsible for the most recognised spoken language on the planet, it has produced scientists such as Alexander Fleming and Isaac Newton, explorers like Cook and Walter Raleigh, writers, Shakespeare and Dickens, musical culture from The Beatles and ...