Issue 54

..is the issue. For example, I’m certain the food ‘experts’ would decry the quality of food we ate back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. (If we’d seen a sign saying ‘fat free’ back then, we would have assumed it was free fat being advertised). It’s simply that in those days we didn’t eat nearly the…

.. take his daughter roller-skating. Out of curiosity I opened the German phrase book at random, and the first phrase that I saw was ‘Ist hier in der Nähe ein Atomkraftwerk?’ which translates as, ‘Is there an atomic power station around here?’ A curious question to ask when you come to think about it, and…

‘I won’t be fooled again’, I muttered to nobody in particular, knowing full well that I will be fooled again – and again – by a relentlessly and pointlessly changing world. However, there are small victories to be had for the vigilant observer. School children don’t need to have our attention drawn to them, but…

Anyway, the moment I shed a tear in Ricki and the Flash happened to be a line from Rick Springfield’s character (Greg) when he was putting the word on Meryl Streep’s character, (Ricki aka Linda) which, coincidentally is one of the lines featured in the trailer (that I fortunately didn’t see beforehand) so it must…

Our first regular dentist was the ancient Dr McIntyre, who was on the first floor off Cathedral Square in the then small but undiminished Christchurch. There was a clanking open-frame lift with pantographic doors, but one felt safer taking the wide polished wooden stairs up to the linoleum landings with their doors of frosted glass….

..are carried away by the northerly wind that bends the trees; the sand is now too hot to walk on in bare feet unless one adopts the hot-foot walk of a Namibian lizard; canvas is cracking in the wind and the horizon has upside down mirages of the container ships queuing to pass through the…