Category: A’s Assortment

MOST of the headlines in the Times cause me to move on quickly to the next page but yesterday provided an egregious exception. It read: Heavy drinkers ‘healthier and happier in later years’. … Continue readingI’ll drink to that!

OUR neighbours in the Ribble Valley include a couple who, since they are big Thunderbirds fans, I shall call Virgil and Lady Penelope. Now retired, they were both coppers at … Continue readingShoplifters’ Paradise

WOMEN who were executed after being accused of witchcraft are no doubt sighing with relief after receiving an official apology from Nicola Sturgeon. The Scottish First Minister climbed off her own … Continue readingDead Witches’ Lives Matter

MANY readers will have fond memories of Mr Benn, the animated television series aired first by the BBC in the early 1970s and repeated many times since. Its title character regularly leaves … Continue readingThe adventures of Mr Benn Johnson

IN commercial breaks before, during and after tonight’s footie you will doubtless see adverts for Gazprom, the Russian gas producer, and wonder as I have: Why do they bother? It’s … Continue readingGazprom blows the EU a raspberry

SPARE a thought for poor old Floella Benjamin. Or rather Dame Floella. Having arrived in the UK as a child from her native Trinidad, she grew up in leafy Beckenham, Kent, and worked … Continue readingDame Flo paints it black

I HAD always assumed that the emails one receives, usually from Nigeria, offering a share in a multi-million-pound fortune on condition of supplying one’s bank details were the product of … Continue readingI’m rich (again)

I TAKE it that readers shared my astonishment yesterday to learn from TCW’s Caroline ffiske that an official document from some group of nutters called the Proud Trust recommends 13-year-old pupils should play … Continue readingParadice Lost

FOR sheer brass neck, few can hold a candle to the disgraced former Labour MP Fiona Onasanya. She, you might recall, served a jail sentence for perverting the course of … Continue readingMeet Ms Motivator

IF, like me, you prefer your detective stories laced with a hefty shot of humour, may I recommend the works of Jonathan Latimer? Born in Chicago in 1906, Latimer was a … Continue readingThe case for Jonathan Latimer