Ah yes, the good old days. You’d pop into the pub for a quiet pint and leave smelling like you’d spent the evening slow-roasting over a bonfire of Marlboro Lights. Clothes ruined, eyes stinging, lungs doing their best impression of a chimney.
You didn’t even have to smoke. Simply existing in the same room was enough. Then along came the smoking ban. And, rather inconveniently for nostalgia merchants, it worked.
Cleaner Air, Fewer ...
A Free Holiday Is a Free Holiday
I’ve always said that if someone offered me a free holiday to Dubai with spending money, I’d take it. Of course I would. I’m not an idiot. It’s free, it’s hot, and there’s a certain anthropological curiosity in observing the natural habitat of people who think tax is a form of persecution.
I’d happily wander around for a week or two, staring at gold-plated everything and wondering how many ...
Back When Iran Looked “Normal”
Seventy years ago, Iran did not look like the villain in a Western action film. It had short skirts. Rock and roll. Universities full of women. Cafes. Newspapers. Arguments about politics that did not involve morality police vans.
It looked, inconveniently, like a country trying to modernise on its own terms. Then oil entered the chat. And oil never enters quietly.
The Man Who Touched the Wrong ...
I am old enough to remember water privatisation in the late 1980s. It was sold as modernisation. Crumbling Victorian infrastructure would be renewed. Efficiency would improve. And as a bonus, ordinary people could make a quick profit by buying shares.
Fishermen, rowers, surfers and nature lovers were worried. Banks, hedge funds and speculators were delighted. Most of the country shrugged and changed the channel, wondering what Den and Angie ...
Let me start here. I’m not a rabid anti-royalist. I’m not polishing a pitchfork or practising republican chants in the shower (although I do sing Billy Bragg’s ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ a fair bit). I understand the argument for a constitutional monarchy. I understand soft power. Tourism. Continuity. Pageantry. Hats.
Fine.
But it is 2026, not 1826. And if we are going to keep the Royal Family, surely it’s time we shrank ...
