A compendium of musical delights by Alan and Margaret Ashworth
MEMOIRS of a grim childhood in working-class Dundee are hardly my normal reading matter. However a raft of enthusiastic reviews led me to invest in Toy Fights: A Boyhood by Don Paterson. … Continue readingThere was a young man from Dundee . . .
IN my early years on the Daily Mail in Manchester I sometimes had to do the late shift, from 7.45pm to 3.45am. Everyone else went home by 2am leaving me and a … Continue readingThe Bolton Slumberer
DOMINIC Sandbrook in the Mail on Sunday draws attention to BBC Radio 4 Extra and its latest repeat of an adaptation of P G Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City. It is preceded by an … Continue readingPsmith and the BBC psilly asses
EVERY time I spend 90p or so on a fresh pineapple from Lidl, I ask myself: ‘How the hell do they do it for the price?’ On a trip to … Continue readingThe pineapple puzzle
WHEN Liz Truss was Foreign Secretary before her calamitous spell as Prime Minister, the Whitehall gossip was that senior civil servants compared their problems in briefing her on overseas policy … Continue readingIn Ted we trust
IN THE mid-1980s, when I did Saturday shifts for the News of the World in Manchester, production was disrupted as a result of the Wapping dispute. With the offices in Withy Grove, near Victoria … Continue readingHammer blow
TWICE daily during term time there is mayhem outside our village school. Morning sees late-arriving mothers abandoning their motors in the middle of the road before hurrying their sons and … Continue readingThe shopper aged seven
ON the evening of October 15, 1987, I was working on the Daily Mail off Fleet Street when I went with a colleague for a break-time drink at a nearby pub named … Continue readingNight of the hurricane
IT’S been a few months since I wrote about the Black Museum, a dog-eared paper collection of howlers perpetrated by reporters and intercepted by sub-editors. So let’s pay another visit to the … Continue readingReturn to the Black Museum
IT IS more than 43 years since Frank Worthington scored a goal of such brilliance that people talk about it still. I’d be fibbing if I claimed to have been … Continue readingThe wonder of Worthington