Issue 46

that there is a world where you could travel where everything looks much the same, where there is no sense of place. Just the same experience. The perfect model is the airport where pretty much no matter where you are it is deliberately the same experience. Many travellers must wonder whether the plane merely flew…

Dick’s Toolbox cont. .. the Iraqi population believe that they are worse than before their country was ‘liberated’. No matter – we now have a new democratic Iraqi government that represents the forces of truth, hope, and unification but which, as ‘The Age’ noted, took five months to elect a Prime Minister who still hasn’t…

..arrived in England courtesy of the English soldiers who were then campaigning in the Lowlands as part of the Thirty Years War. Gin almost became the national sport. It was estimated that every fourth house in England was a gin mill and employers provided gin as part of their pay to workers. It is alleged…

..around in pods texting their friends and acquaintances about what a good time they were having. As they were on a floodlit hill in a gale wearing tee-shirts, shorts and fluorescent wrist bands, this seems somewhat unlikely. But the messages no doubt made their friends reply that they were having an even better time where…

The Cathedral Boys’ Choir in 1958. Or perhaps 1957. I’m second from the top next to the pulpit and next down from me is David McPhail. Hamish ‘Gubby’ Guthrie is sixth down from the left. (Reproduced without permission from David McPhail’s auto-biography, The years before my Death).

Dick’s Toolbox cont. .. Finnish or Urdu for a moment longer. Not only that, their TV, books, magazines and newspapers are all in a foreign language. And whilst the canon of English literature is vast and strewn with masterpieces, such as Peyton Place and Harry Potter, we only really know the literature of other languages…