It can be safely said that, back in 1976 things were pretty much wanting... no jobs, no prospects much, overbearing government - the usual stuff - but, most alarmingly, anything youthful and progressive was in the hands of exploitive record companies, pumping out banal, granny-friendly tunes via radio stations and...

Being Irish myself, and as any Irish school-kid knows well, Saint Patrick was the man who brought hymns and sandals to the Emerald Isle (so called because emeralds was what they used as money back then). He was about eight feet tall, and arrived - walking - by sea on...

Statistics point to the second week in February as the date most people start to slide with their New Year's Resolutions, sometimes the third week - if the thing to be given up is a not to difficult one, like eating expensive, luxury chocolates, or juggling fiery sticks, or dressing-up...

I usually like to keep this blog easy-going, to dispense my daily sights and sounds using my own 'special' brand of light-hearted drivel - humour some might even say - well those in my pay to say so anyway. However, this month I've been prompted to take things on a...

So it's Friday 27th July 2012 and, after 7 years of exhausting preparations, London is welcoming the world. For my part, I'm standing at Charing Cross Station, listening to our beloved mayor, Boris Johnson - he of bike fame - on the tannoy, telling us all (as he's done for...

With exactly seven months to go until the end of the world, I have got to thinking as to how it might manifest itself (I would've written this blog next month, when it was a round half year to go - but I'll be on a beach then, reading a...

Now, with regard to the grammar and spell-checker controls on my computer's software, although I'm somewhat reticent to use them (what with being an arty-farty writer and all), I do feel a rosy glow that they're there - a friendly guide, drawing a comforting jagged, coloury line under my all...

This is by no means an original topic for a blog, and every year tends to get churned up again and again - so please accept my apologies for regurgitating the unsavoury matter but, in my terror and in support of my fellow, fearful shopo-phobes, I feel it worthy of...

It can arguably be said that before the 1950s men were suave and debonair, and women delightful - a tentative balance, whereby everyone knew their place and what society demanded of them. Ah, but then came the revolution, with unfeasibly loud music, gyrating hips, attire that could be called -...

Now I've always considered myself a funky kinda chappie, not exactly mutton dressed as lamb, but I feel myself young for my age - casting derisory glances at those other, prematurely wrinkled (not clued-in oldies) who, the first second after their thirtieth-fifth birthday, seem to automatically develop Chino endowed legs,...