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The British generation now drawing its old age pensions differs markedly in at least one respect from Generation X or Z or Q, or whatever now supports the Green Party. Us oldies spent most of our young lives smelling of slightly stale tobacco, with ash trays (occasionally even emptied) in every room of the house, and at every opportunity, flicking lighters for a quick draw. And there were plenty of opportunities: in the lecture hall, on buses and trains, in aircraft (later,

For those old enough to remember, the song Melting Pot was the debut single released in 1969 by UK pop group, Blue Mink. Although it has since been banned from the airways for “offensive racist language”, it was in fact a hymn to racial tolerance and multiculturism. This ‘hippy’ call for blending and racial integration was banned in 2019 as “likely to cause offence” after just ONE complaint to Ofcom when the song was played on ‘golden oldies’ station Gold. Frankly I never lik

And so the order went out from the editorial suite on the 51st level: “No more Trump”. And forty floors below, Stoker pulled up his green eyeshade, moodily pulled his half-written essay on Donald out of the battered Remington, and flung it at the waste paper basket, missing, as always, by a yard. Lolling back in the battered wooden chair which is standard issue to Only Connect scribblers, he surveyed the narrow view, blocked as it was by the soaring tower of Copper House, gl

On the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, I crossed the Arctic Circle heading north. I wasn’t aiming for Greenland, hoping to stake my claim before Trump got there; I was chasing the receding polar night line. We never quite caught up with it; we arrived at Norway’s northernmost point three days late. North Cape had daylight. But the interval between nominal sunrise and nominal sunset was supposedly an hour and a half; it was hard to tell...

Several readers have told me they enjoyed the innocence in the lines from my journal of boyhood in smalltown Cheltenham. So here is another extract as preface to an event in Lima: Friday, January 6th 1956 I went to town dressed as a girl, because I didn't want to wear my school uniform. Valerie lent me her scarf to wear on my head, and said I looked like a girl. That's how the idea came. We met Rosina (my sister) and Ian (her boyfriend) in the Promenade, and he did not reco