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Written by Fifty Not Out
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Thursday, 04 February 2010 |
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When historians look back on the noughties, 25th December 2009 will be recorded as another nail in the coffin of air transport. The reason has nothing to do with carbon emissions, high cost, the sheer dreadfulness of Ryanair or even the fact that because we're in Britain, you can't even get to an airport on Christmas Day because there's no feckin public transport. No, the reason is something that could have come straight out of the pages of Viz.
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Written by Steve Ward
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Friday, 18 December 2009 |
There was a time when Europe was a continent, writes Steve Ward. It was classified as such in atlases and encyclopaedias and the constituent parts were reasonably well known to any British school kid in a geography class. There were France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and some small countries in the North West between France and Scandinavia. Then there were a few joke states like Monaco, Andorra and San Marino. They were jokes only insofar as they are ridiculously small and not really what you'd classify as a country at all. And that was Europe. Nice and compact, easily defined, foreign, and definitely a physical presence.
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Written by Steve Ward
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Tuesday, 27 October 2009 |
Despite harbouring a fondness for what Pele described as ‘the beautiful game’, this column has not often dwelt too long on the subject, writes Steve Ward. Although a great many people share Pele's view, there are an equal number - and not all of them female - that can't see the point in grown men chasing a ball. Of course, if they are just chasing the ball, it's a fairly low level of football that's going on, but that's not the point.
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Written by Fifty Not Out
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Tuesday, 06 October 2009 |
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Come Fly With Me
Airports. Dontcha just
hate them? Anyone who has been forced to use one in recent times, and we'll
define 'recent times' in a minute, will have been stressed beyond reasonable
limits by the horrible places.
Those of us well into
middle age can remember when flying used to be a slightly exciting prospect for
most plebs. It wasn't something we did very often, and so it was to be looked
forward to as an experience. The airport, back then, was an integral part of
that experience. There were strange procedures that didn't exist anywhere else.
Tickets were complicated multi-leaf things with carbon copies. Even security
checks, which consisted of walking through a metal detector gate, were a bit
novel, and so yes, exciting.
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Written by Steve Ward
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Thursday, 20 August 2009 |
We return to not one, but two old favourites this month, because sadly, neither is ever far from view. In fact, 'old favourites' under-cooks it a bit, because a much better word to describe the topics would be obsessions. The two things, neatly linked in this instance, are fame and the utter, utter dreadfulness of our glorious leaders.
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Written by Steve Ward
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Thursday, 16 July 2009 |
What does the word mean to you? If you're of a certain vintage (old git), then Fame is the title of a David Bowie song from his I-wish-I-were-James-Brown period. For anyone born in the 1970s, Fame is the TV show turned film turned stage show turned video game turned breakfast cereal that captured the nation's teenagers by their heartstrings, filling their poor little heads with ideas of song and dance immortality.
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Written by Fifty Not Out
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Monday, 01 June 2009 |
 The title of this month's missive is not, as you would first think, about whether your uncle is any good at doing his job. However, the circumstantial evidence is that should he be employed in providing you with a service of any kind, then he won't be, but that's not the point. At least, it's not the whole point.
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Written by Steve Ward
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Friday, 17 April 2009 |
Two months ago, the Grumpy Goose filed a column in this here magazine that will have struck a chord with a great many people in the UK. The gist of it was a huge contempt and general dislike for the USA and all who sail in her. This is a fashionable and widespread view, and in fact, until a certain Mr Obama came onto the scene, GG's opinion was just about universal across the rest of the entire world. That view holds that America, and by extension therefore each and every American, is arrogant, ignorant, loud and far too outgoing. Oh, and fat too.
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Written by Steve Ward
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Monday, 02 February 2009 |
Here's a nice little dose of doom and gloom to match the winter weather. It starts with a line most famously sung by Frank Sinatra. It runs like this: “Love and marriage.......go together like a horse and carriage.”
That's what the old song says and maybe it's even true for some people. But for many others, love and marriage comes before a trip to the lawyer and penury.
Given the way that the divorce courts work in this country, it's clear that anyone with their own money who gets themselves into a wedded state is asking for trouble. Or you could look at it from the other point-of-view and say there is a fortune to be made out of marriage, by hitching then ditching a sleb.
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Written by Steve Ward
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Thursday, 27 November 2008 |
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Over the last twenty or so years, the amount of wine drunk per annum in the UK has increased in volume from an Olympic sized swimming pool's worth, to something closer to the contents of Lake Windermere. In fact, having used the cliché about Olympic sized swimming pool, there's a huge temptation to fall back on the other standard phrase of measurement and say it's now the size of Wales. Yes, to pass the test of journalistic competence, it is necessary for any writer to compare things to the size of Wales. Clearly, for a liquid, that doesn't work. So Lake Windermere it is. And remember, you read it here first.
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