When I was a kid, bonfire night or Guy Fawkes night was an invite to Withey's house to watch my Dad or Terry Withey making a nonsense of the theory that you never return to an apparently dud firework.
All we really knew about Guy himself was that he plotted to blow-up parliament and was apparently a bit of a traitor, rather than 17th-century proof that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
Of course, with the advent Google ...
When I was at school, modern history was one the few things that really interested me really. I was respectably good at English, art and geography, mediocre at religious education, biology and home economics (though I made a mean fruit salad) and unspeakably bad at mathematics, technical drawing, chemistry and physics.
In fact I was so bad at maths and the sciences, if I had put the results of all three together, I would have still been ...
For a forty something bloke who likes nothing better than to vent his spleen with the written word, this week has been an utter classic of our time.
Not content with championing a man dismissed by the BBC for a sustained verbal and physical assault on a junior employee, we then had people on the Radio discussing counselling for children who found the departure of a kid from a pop band just too traumatic to take.
I don't know what kids in ...
Firstly, thank you to everyone who offered so much positive comments via Facebook, Twitter and email regarding my most recent post about the shocking increase in male suicide rates. It is probably the most response I have had to a blog in the eight years I have been writing them.
It has also gained me more readership after I suffered a dent in my confidence last week when I received a couple of anonymous, semi-sinister emails regarding the ...
What a crazy few weeks it has been on the the television, with programmes featuring all the glory of war, the holocaust, Churchill and the Magna Carta.
As interesting as they are, I often find that these programmes about modern history seem to have a somewhat elitist bias to them, possibly because the majority of the arts and media industry is dominated by the offspring of the ruling classes.
Churchill for instance, has been documented as ...
