Last Saturday evening I watched the 1977 film “The Spy Who Loved Me”, Roger Moore’s third outing as James Bond. ITV have been showing Bond movies at weekends throughout this summer. I have caught an hour or more of several of these screenings but had not watched any of them all the way through. I… Continue reading Drinking with Bryan Marshall
This time last year, while on holiday in Spain, I was bitten repeatedly by insects. It prompted this piece (Holiday notes: sun, sea, sand, and insect bites) which includes some photos showing the after-effects of insect bites on my skin. It came with a warning, in case you are squeamish about such things. I have,… Continue reading Insect bites (August 2020 update)
If things had gone to plan (and that phrase must have been uttered billions of times in the last five months) we would now be enjoying the Summer Olympics from Tokyo. Like most sporting events in this year of COVID-19 it has been postponed, in this case to July and August 2021. In place of… Continue reading Olympic memories: London 2012 and London 1948, the closest any of my family has come to taking part
Here’s a picture of my Sony MiniDisc Walkman which has just celebrated its 22nd birthday. As you can see, it’s an MZ-R30, and it still works perfectly. So do the hundreds of discs that I have bought for it over the years, examples of which appear in the following picture. The original charger continues to… Continue reading Word of the week: MiniDisc
Last month I wrote two pieces about the Elephant Parade, an event that took place 10 years ago here in London. As I wrote in the second of those pieces: “Streets, parks, squares and indoor spaces were populated by life-size models of baby elephants, painted by a variety of artists. It captured our imagination, and… Continue reading A few more words about the Elephant Parade, and some more recent pictures
July 1972 was a good time to walk into a record shop and buy your first 7” single. (12” singles did not exist yet.) You might have asked for one of the releases that had been #1 in May or June and was now making its way down the charts, “Vincent” by Don McLean perhaps,… Continue reading The first record I ever bought
If you watch TV regularly, you are probably familiar with “Gogglebox”, a show that was first broadcast here in the UK in 2013. It has become a recent addition to our family viewing thanks to a series of celebrity editions that have just finished airing on Channel 4 on Friday nights. The original version of… Continue reading Word of the week: “Gogglebox”
Here, for the final time this season, and the last time for at least another year on this Blog, is a screenshot taken from the BBC website showing Leeds United top of the Championship, the second tier of English football. The regular season is over. Leeds, the team that I have followed since childhood, have… Continue reading The Promised Land
ITV are currently screening repeats of Series 2 of quiz show “Tenable” on weekday afternoons. This piece from July 2019 lists the questions and answers from the first 11 episodes of that series. I described it as “Raw ‘Tenable’ data” because it was not edited and tidied up in the same way as most of… Continue reading “Tenable” Series 2, repeated July 2020, episode 12 onwards
Leeds United and Republic of Ireland football legend Jack Charlton died last week, aged 85. May he rest in peace. He was a legend as a player for Leeds (773 appearances, a club record) and for England (a World Cup winner in 1966) and was by some distance the most succesful manager in the history… Continue reading Jack Charlton RIP, and the England World Cup winning team: more dead than alive
The Compartments 