Not one of my posts but a nationally published letter sent by singer-songwriter, comedian, author, poet, broadcaster, multi-instrumentalist and professional northerner, Mike Harding, to Theresa May. If you’ve not already seen it, it’s certainly worth two minutes of your time.
Apparently, there are 7161 people in the UK who are currently registered as owning a black-and-white television. Now, from Schindler’s List to The Artist I love black-and-white films and I fully concede that, by eschewing much of today’s tech gimmickry, I do live a little in the past, but a black-and-white tele, come on peeps get with the programme, literally and metaphorically. Notwithstanding the lower licence fee, £49 as opposed to the more colourful counterpart’s £150.50, what’s that all about, is it not a curiously high number and completely fascinating?
Jeff Bezos has recently announced his New York homecoming by declaring the two new Amazon HQ offices will be sited on the east coast as opposed to Seattle, and about time too. The Big Apple has always been the spiritual home of the corporate giant since it was here, in 1994, that Bezos, then managing a hedge-fund on Wall Street, had the idea for the retail company. At that point, however, Amazon had yet to be named and the two front-runners were ‘Cadabra’ and ‘Relentless’.
Having survived what many consider to be her darkest, of many dark hours, and with the whole world railing against her, I’ve been confronted with a somewhat unprecedented feeling towards our beleaguered Prime Minister: sympathy. Thankfully, I recognised it just in time and was able to take myself in hand for a good stiff talking to. The key, I realised, is to look at it in the whole, to see her current predicament in the context of her past decisions and actions.
Broadsword Calling Danny Boy. Come in, Danny Boy, do you read me? I make no apology for the fact that this post will mean absolutely nothing to the vast majority of you. But to the one or two that is does, it will be pure gold! Several months ago an earlier post detailed my celluloid ‘guilty pleasures’ – films that arguably hold precious little technical, photography, acting or even story-telling merit but, for whatever reasons, keep drawing me back to watch them.
After watching the beautiful remembrance day service on the tele last Sunday, I had a sudden rush of pride and patriotism. There’s nothing like a turn-out of the great and good to focus our attention: high profile dignitaries, polished top-brass, secretive Whitehall officials, brave soldiers marching in perfect time, Chelsea pensioners and humble aged veterans standing to attention with an old school dignity that evokes an unavoidable stir of emotion.
You’d be pleasantly surprised at the conversations that take place during our Sunday morning ride-out. Not for us are tall tales of tittle-tattle, of derring-do, of misspent youth or athletic endeavour. Oh no, the other day I overheard a fascinating conversation between two perspiring perambulators about garden trees. And not content with merely that, they expanded into what exactly trees get up to at night. WTF.
Cards on the table, I don’t really ‘get’ the structure of American politics. The recent mid-term elections just further confused me as I can’t grasp the differences between the Senate and the House of Representatives, the former being the ‘upper’ chamber of the Congress and the latter the ‘lower’. I’m kinda assuming that it’s something similar to our national and local governments, or perhaps it’s more akin to the Houses of Parliament and Lords?
Did I bang-on too much about my lovely lasagne and superior spaghetti? Have I yanked your chain once too often about your Brexit-supporting vote? Was I truly on my jack-jones when pulling-my-face about spending the equivalent of a small South American country’s GDP on this year’s Halloween extravaganza? Or have you just not simply had the time or inclination to respond?
Apparently, there’s an adage in the restaurant business that there’s always good dough to be made by selling pizza. Boom, boom. However, in researching the earlier piece concerning my own dietary fads and habits, this appears to be no longer the case. Almost 40% of the UK’s top 100 restaurant groups are now loss making, and the majority are Italians.