This article appeared in todays Daily Telegraph. I post it here with no further comment. A French hospital had to be evacuated after a man in his 80s presented to doctors with a First World War shell stuck inside his rear. Though the 88-year-old assured staff the shell was a collector’s item that had been deactivated, staff at the Sainte Musse Hospital in Toulon scrambled to evacuate some of its patients, redirect others, and call in the bomb squad.  “An apple, a mango, or even shaving foam…we’re used to finding unusual objects inserted where they shouldn’t be,” an unnamed ER … Continue reading Hospital evacuated as man, 88, has WWI shell removed from inside his body

A few days ago I suggested one way of getting into the mind of Putin is to study the behaviour of another psychopathic dictator – Adolf Hitler in the film ‘Downfall’. I’m not sure that was entirely correct, but my point was that the way these people think is so far removed from the way a normal person – that’s you and I – thinks, if we want to understand them we need to find some way of getting inside their head. The following article by the historian, ‘Orlando Figes’, was published in the Daily Telegraph today. It provides an … Continue reading Putin’s foreign policy.

Like everybody else, I’m shocked, horrified and disgusted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.   Sitting here in the comfort of my house in Hasketon, I long to be able to do something, but apart from the obvious donations to aid agencies and encouraging our government to support Ukraine as much as possible, I’m really not in a position to do much to help. The problem is, I think, that we all spend the vast majority of our time interworking with reasonable, sensible and pragmatic people. People who, generally speaking, think like we do even if we don’t agree.  But occasionally … Continue reading Inside the mind of a dictator.

One Sunday afternoon a year or so ago I found myself listening to a Radio 4 adaptation of Jules Verne’s story, ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’.  It’s a good yarn I remembered reading as a teenager, although I did recall getting a bit confused at the time since I had assumed that 20,000 leagues referred to the depth, not the distance travelled. (A league is about 3 miles, so 20,000 of them would have gone right through the earth and out the other side).  Anyway, the main characters in the story are Professor Pierre Aronnax, his servant Conseil, the harpoonist … Continue reading Changing the story to reflect the modern agenda.