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DEFEND OUR NATIONAL TREASURE
Mansfield's Kings Mill HospitalNo profit: Just Care, Just People.As our work-worn physiques begin breaking down, those of us in the older generation need to visit a hospital more often than we’d wish....
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R.I.P. CUBA
FIDELAh, el Commandante, you have gone.Alien forces sought your deathYet nature took its courseAnd now the vitriol pours forthThe stored-up denigration ragesBrutal Dictator, dark shadow overCuba’s...
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Looking back over the 73 Christmases I’ve had, I doubt that there has ever been a yuletide as unsettling as this. The world we hoped for decades ago never quite materialised, and what remained of those...
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Something Wicked This Way Comes
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES:Are you ready for ‘Fascism Lite™’? On a fine, warm sunny morning in June, a few days after the EU Referendum, as I wandered around the stalls on Mansfield’s Market...
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YE BLEWS
‘Ye Blews’Blues means what milk does to a baby. Blues is what the spirit is to the minister. We sing the blues because our hearts have been hurt, our souls have been disturbed.Alberta HunterAs waggish...
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CHRISTMAS QUACKERS: A TRUE STORY.
Christmas Quackers:a true story for Yuletide.By December 1958 I had reached the mature ripeness of 14, and on Christmas Eve, although I didn’t yet know it, I was about to stand on the first steps at...
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2016: THE YEAR OF THE DEAD
2016 has been, beyond any stretch of the imagination, a year of death and despair. The horrors of Syria, the continuing, inexplicable evil hatred of terrorism against the innocent, the avoidable, badly...
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A HOGMANAY HORROR
PORTRAIT OF A 2017 IDIOTHow odd the way the stars align and spark events without warning. Yet if that sounds more than a little airy-fairy, it probably is. The way my New Year commenced was little to...
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Ants and Elephants
ANTS AND ELEPHANTSI am 73, typing this with one hand as my broken left arm is hanging limp and useless in its brace at my side. As an elderly Briton, like many of my ilk, I could sometimes be accused...
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THE GREAT UK U.F.O. HOAX
Hoaxed!Mention the name Lembit Öpik these days, and this ex- Liberal Democrat MP for Montgomeryshire usually conjures up an erogenous image of his dalliance with Rumanian pop tarts the Cheeky Girls....
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OLD AS THE HILLS
As Old As the HillsReflections on being a codgerI remember a day, perhaps 50 or more years ago. A hot day in summer, when I was between ships, working ashore in the building trade to earn a few extra...
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Falling Angels
FALLING ANGELSComrades of physicians, More useful than a priest they stand Bound by paperwork, short on hands,Rarely ever short on caring,Just drained of energy and sleep.Male or female, angels are...
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A SINISTER DARKNESS
A SINISTER DARKNESS:The Forgotten Works ofPaul Andreas WeberIn 1995 I was commissioned by The New Statesman magazine to write a feature on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau Concentration...
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PROTEST IS POINTLESS
IS PROTEST NOW POINTLESS?“Populism, political programe or movement that champions the common person, usually by favourable contrast with an elite. Populism usually combines elements of the left and the...
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The Curse of Red Trousers
THE CURSE OF THE RED TROUSERSWorking class people dress themselves according to their tribe. At the bottom level from teens to maybe mid-40s, there’s grey jogging pants, trainers, some kind of...
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GERIATRICA
Thomas Cole The Journey of Life (1842) National GalleryGERIATRICAOh, how they tell you,There are reasons to be cheerful, And oh, how you reply “I know”.Yet windswept youth has a smiling agendaThe ocean...
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Sparrows in Aleppo
SPARROWS IN ALEPPOThe rain has ceased and like a golden ariaA blackbird sings among the green.That high, velvet trill of nature’s innocenceCaresses my mind and slowlyPushes away a congregation of...
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