Many sci-fi movies are built around the idea of discovering intelligent life elsewhere - or in some cases, the aliens discovering us. Ad Astra, a movie that came out in 2019, is not that kind of film. I thought this was a good time to revisit the film, g…

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There is a broad theory about emerging industries and products. It is called the theory of Dominant Design, or Design Convergence. At the moment AI operates in lots of siloes and often replicates existing business processes - for example, procurement cycles, test cycles - rather than rewriting them.

All fixed line phones look the same - if you ever use o…

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Fried chicken seems to have taken over our High Streets.

It is everywhere. A bit like those Korean nail parlours and American candy stores, the number of chicken shops is growing rapidly as High Streets die.

In the UK the numbers are up 6 per cent in the past year. So much so, I have started recording some of the names.

Best one so far is a place called Cluck, Yeah near me in Brentford. Kid you not.

There are over 8,000 chicken shops in London as I write. This makes London the European, if not the world capital, of fried chicken shops. Why should this be?

Poverty is one factor. Chicken is relatively cheap, even if a lot of it is very poor quality - it is not Waitrose, that’s for sure.

It tends to be loaded with water and salt. I think also a lot of people in lower-paid jobs cannot be bothered to cook when takeaways are relatively cheap.

Not their fault. If you were up at 4am I can understand that cooking in the evening may not be your highest priority.

I think there is also a generic concern about shops that spring up and very quickly die - suspicion of money laundering.

What follows should be seen as an adjunct to the wonderful style guides of organisations such as The Guardian and The Economist. Both are available on Amazon.1

• Action plan – It is just a plan. An action plan is something politicians, civil servants, and middle managers talk about to make it sound more important than it is. It is still just a plan to the rest of us. Seems to me that most ‘action plans’ produce a lot of inaction.

• Arrive into - this is an americanism. We used to say just arrive at or arrive in. It is poncey and useless. Get rid of it.

• Artificial intelligence or AI – This is so widely used in contexts that have nothing to do with either. All kinds of scammers are using AI as a code for getting your money now - or that of investors. If you are not sure, strike it out.

• At this moment in time - You just mean now. This one really irritates me. Same applies to ‘at the present time’.

• Context or in context – Very often this is just a way of padding out an article. The context should already be clear or you would not be writing it. If it isn’t clear consider writing a sidebar that explains the background.

• Exciting - An overworked word used by middle managers announcing their latest dreary marketing plan. It should never be used in copy, unless in a direct quote where there is some sense of irony or other meaning that brings the story to life.

• Let me be clear on this – A phrase used by politicians desperately trying to sound like they know what they are doing. There is nothing clear about this — strike it out. It usually means exactly the opposite.

• Machine learning - now mostly replaced by AI, which is broadly the same thing. See the entry above on AI.

• Narrative - this now appears every time anybody wants to explain something, eg ‘Their narrative is….’ Truth is it is a meaningless word, long enough to trip over. Try replacing it with viewpoint, perspective, point of view - anything but this nonsense.

• Postcode lottery - sick to death of hearing this phrase. It means that services may be better or worse depending on where you live.

• Share - as in ‘I would like to share this information’. As the comedian David Mitchell once said, sharing is what we do with biscuits. Tell or reveal or any one of another 100 verbs will work better and sound less like business jargon.

• So - starting sentences with ‘So’ - with or without the accompanying comma - has become a fashion statement everywhere. It adds nothing to what follows and is totally unnecessary. This is particularly used by radio and TV journalists and their interviewees.

• Totally unbiased – Nothing, even scientific data or journalists, can be totally unbiased. Cognitive models can be completely wrong, so even understanding data is really hard. It is also a tautology, a bit like very unique. It is either unbiased or not.

• Unique – A really overused word. Few things are unique. And if they are unique, they cannot be qualified. Very unique is used constantly in broadcast journalism, particularly.

• Unprecedented – Rarely is the case, cut it out. There is very little that is not precedented.

• Z versus s - It is so basic. UK English uses S in words such as organisation, Americans use Z. Many young writers are unaware - because their computers are set to US English. Same applies to centre, English, centre, US, and colour and color.

• Weather conditions – You mean weather. Severe weather is just bad weather. Strike it out or be more specific - eg Storm XXXXX is the most intense since diddly-blah-blah.

I have watched the Quiet Girl now at least three times. Every time, I see more in it. It is a gentle, compassionate and moving film. It has been compared to Heidi, that famous 19th century tale of a young girl sent to live with her grandfather. Yet, it delivers so much more.

Nine-year-old Cáit, on the edge of womanhood, lives in an entirely dysfunctiona…

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I just rejoined the V&A as a member. I also have memberships with the British Library and the British Museum. I do find myself asking, is it really worth it or is it just a scam that museums, in London especially, use to boost their revenues? In this little piece, I am going to review that.

The biggest single thing is that you cannot predict your usage of a museum membership. It depends on their calendar of events, your own time and availability and your desire to visit. Forget things like Members Rooms, they are mostly very average - with the exception of the V&A members restaurant - and while they give you a place to meet, the food and atmosphere is generally bored to death.

Usually, these memberships cost around £120 per head per year. You can usually bring a guest on a single user ticket but it sometimes pays to get another membership for a spouse or partner, guests or little kiddies.

For us, I think the British Museum membership at least has paid off. We saw at least four exhibitions in the past year. Entrance to each one averages about £20 a head and membership per person is roughly £100. So with some simple, maths you would need to see at least five exhibitions a year to make this work on that basis.

The other benefit of course is access - particularly to tourist hotspots like the British Museum, where weekend queues can be hundreds of metres long. A members’ pass fast-tracks you through all that. Also there is out of hours access to the galleries on guided tours. These cost money but are cheaper for members.

Bear in mind that not all members passes give you priority entrance - I had a falling out with the British Library security team a months ago on a bitterly cold winter’s morning. They had a queue a mile long of students going to find desks to work there all day. I just wanted to see the Renaissance Women exhibition. They were not having it and even with a follow up email to the marketing director, no dice.

There are some other benefits, for example use of members’ rooms and I guess the kudos of being a member. However, in my experience so far, members rooms are not great.

British Museum members room is dire. As is the British Library equivalent. If you want stale croissants and warm beer these are the places go to.

The best of them is probably the V&A where they have a members room and a restaurant. The restaurant is not cheap and not the sort of place where you can lounge around with a cappucino all day. It’s more designed for ladies who lunch - sorry for the casual sexism. Nor is it very well equipped for us digital nomads - no USB points or extra screens anywhere.

So, in summary, if you are eager to get a museum or art gallery pass in London, just think about how you are likely to use it. You need easy access via public transport to make most use of it and you need to have a keen interest in whatever is on display. I personally enjoy history and got a lot of pleasure from the Silk Roads and Legion exhibitions at the British Museum over the past 12 months. Also saw a couple of things at the V&A last year that I enjoyed.

To be honest, you could just forgo all this crap and buy tickets when you need them. Your choice. Just think before committing.

The motivation behind placing a bet is complex. It is a bit like playing the stock markets.

Some people place the occasional bet for fun. Maybe it is an annual event like the Grand National or a football derby like El Clásico in Spain. Bets like this are for the thrill and not placed with a…

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You know for sure you are in Ireland when within moments of arrival at your hotel, there’s a knock at the door and two ‘wee’ cups of tea magically appear.

We were on the first day of a road trip up the mystical East coast from Dublin to Belfast, taking in many sensational sights along the way.

We had flown in to Dublin the afternoon before and picked up a Budget hire car for the short drive to Drogheda, close to Newgrange. That night, we stayed at the Scholars Townhouse Hotel, where the rooms are decorated in an eclectic if not eccentric style. Ours had a beautiful four-poster antique bed. We could not have had a more friendly welcome.

After a not-so-wee Irish breakfast with white and black puddings that were lip-smackingly good, we headed off down the beautiful Boyne Valley, setting for one of the most significant battles in European history in 1690.

Back then Catholic ambitions to re-take the English crown were finally vanquished by King William, the protestant usurper (Spoiler alert: Some may not see it like that). Then we drove on to Newgrange.

Nobody could have prepared us for the magnificent neolithic tombs that cover the whole area. They are vast, absolutely vast. More than 5,000 years old, they pre-date not only Stonehenge but also the Great Pyramids and the early civilisation of Crete. The craziest thing is, we have virtually no idea who built them or why or how.

We drove on to the Europa Hotel in Belfast, a place that has so much history. At one point, this was the most bombed hotel in Europe and a home for so many journalistic colleagues. Today the only bombs were chocolate ones. We ate in the hotel restaurant that evening and it was pretty good, I confess.

By now we were acclimatising ourselves to that Belfast accent - some of it sounded, to our ears, a bit like a dialect of Klingon to begin with but within an hour or two, we were fully in tune. A wee bit, anyway.

The following morning, we headed to the Titanic Quarter for the Titanic Experience. It was a bit disappointing. Firstly, it was heaving on a Mothers’ Day weekend which made seeing or reading anything hugely difficult. Secondly, it was a grim windy, wet day and even enjoying the views from outside of that spectacular building was pretty difficult.

We went back to the Europa where we found some very lovely locals eagerly expecting a ceilidh band to start up. I have to say it was very welcoming and also extremely entertaining. We could easily have spent all day there but we had to check in for our next hotel, The Titanic.

This hotel is probably less than 100 yards from the exhibition and has Titanic artwork and rivets everywhere. We ate that night in the bar, once a place where designers worked day and night, creating huge ships on blueprints.

It was not cheap but worth every penny.

The following morning, we made a wee detour to the Crumlin Road Gaol - a gruesome place with a long history. Today, you can even hold your wedding there. Seems a bit strange to me.

As we started to head south for the flight home, we arrived in Warrenpoint. It is sadly best known as the location of a terrible ambush of British Paratroops during the Troubles. I actually covered it at the time as a young reporter, interviewing parents of one of the young soldiers from London who was killed. As I recall, he was just 18.

Today, Warrenpoint is expanding. A new bridge soon will connect the North of Ireland with the South across the Newry River and, when we arrived, the sun was shining on a beautiful afternoon.

We sat on a the terrace of our hotel - The Whistledown - where, in the words of the song, ‘the Dark Mourne sweeps down to the sea’. We sat for a couple of hours watching the sun set over the water. Magical. And I thought of that poor lad who had been killed, and all the others on both sides. For what? Nothing, another life wiped out and deprived its future.

How we got there

We flew from London Heathrow to Dublin on a scheduled Aer Lingus flight - a brand new Airbus 320 Neo. Lovely.

Accommodation (hotels all booked through booking.com)

• Scholars Townhouse Hotel, Drogheda - £145 double room, with antique four-poster bed

• Europa Hotel, Belfast - £180, double superior room

• Titanic Hotel, Belfast - £397, double superior room (expensive, but worth it as a one-off)

• Whistledown Hotel, Warrenpoint - £153, double room with sea view

Sites visited

• Newgrange - https://www.newgrange.com/

• Battle of the Boyne Museum - https://www.meath.ie/discover/heritage/heritage-sites/battle-of-the-boyne-site

• Titanic Belfast - https://www.titanicbelfast.com/

• Warrenpoint - https://www.visitwarrenpoint.com/

Greatest Love of his Life

The moment Bert saw her, he fell in love. Her curves twisted and gleamed, her body howled, take me, take me and that is what Bert did.

He bought that 1964 Ferrari 275 GTB Speciale for cash in 1975. The price was over a million even then but an arrangement with some East End villains and a dubious property developer had generated a lot of money. Bert was a high flyer.

Seven years later, he was still in love with the Ferrari. The same could not be said of his wife, the 24-year-old page three stunner he had married just a month and a half after buying the car.

As he stood in the garage of his palatial home in stockbroker belt, he stroked and patted the car - now worth nearly three million - and looked forward to what would be a most memorable day, the day his divorce from Helena would be finalised.

He would finally be free of her after what had been truly rancorous process - or as he colourfully put it to his lawyer, ‘like pulling rusty barbed wire out of my arse.’

She had belittled him with her sleazy boyfriends, outrageous shopping habits and her expensive tastes in foreign travel. For the past year, she had been variously studying Art History and Spanish, allegedly. They barely spoke, although they continued to share different wings in the same monstrous home.

Bert stepped off the train at Waterloo that morning and began his stroll - at a suitably regal pace - across the river to Fleet Street.

He was a self-made man in every sense. From the tip of his huge head to the ends of his disproportionately tiny feet, Bert Bobbins, was his very own creation. He had that air of self-satisfaction about him to which only the truly ignorant aspire.

Halfway across, he stopped a moment, put both hands on the parapet and looked across the river towards Westminster. Here he was, Editor of The Daily Growler and up for a knighthood any day now. Nineteen stones of tabloid genius. The biggest man in Fleet Street, oh yes.

He turned and took in the crowds of office workers speeding across towards the City but Bert Bobbins rushed for no man. Four million readers a day, he thought to himself, are sharing our crusade to rid Britain of mealy-mouthed liberals and lefty smart-arses.

A bus pulled up and he looked at himself in the windows. What a wonderful sight I am, he thought. On his head, a huge white flat cap dipped at a jaunty angle, conspicuously matching his full length white cashmere overcoat and red silk scarf.

The ensemble was set off with a gleaming pair of handmade brogues and a monogrammed hide briefcase. He carefully adjusted the hat’s very specific angle, consulted his Patek Phillipe watch and set off again.

His look was a carefully crafted blend of the Great Gatsby, The Quiet Man and Biggles Flies South.

He was stopped almost immediately somewhere near his right kneecap.

‘Oi, mate. Watch where you’re going,’ shouted a voice from the pavement.

Bert looked down and saw a raggedy-arsed man in a rage bearing a cardboard sign on which had been scrawled: ‘Need money for beer.’

Bert leaned over the hairy little homeless. ‘Fuck off or I’ll have the police on yer,’ delivered in the full richness of his Lancastrian accent.

For emphasis, he waved an immaculately manicured fist. The homeless rolled over and re-immersed himself in the filthy old sleeping bag that was his home.

The soon-to-be Sir Bert Bobbins strutted onwards across the bridge, past the palatial stonework of the Unilever building, past the dark, dank windows of El Vino’s, past the Old King Lud, The Bell, The Olde Cock, The Punch and the Poppins - legendary under-office boozer of the Daily Express - and strode majestically into the marbled opulence of the Growler’s monstrous Fleet Street offices.

The uniformed Commissionaire, former Warrant Officer Digby Darlton, immaculately turned-out veteran of the Korean War, the Mau Mau Emergency and Northern Ireland, snapped to attention and saluted as Bert walked up the steps. ‘Mornin’, sah’.

Bert carelessly waved a greeting.

‘Morning Digby - how’s yer mutha?’‘Not so bad, sir, well, as can be expected… ’But Bert was already halfway up to the mezzanine floor. Digby shrugged and stood at ease. It was a strange year, 1982.

The average Joe dreamt of owning a Ford Sierra and the Prime Minister was Margaret Thatcher, hugely unpopular until she launched an armada to take back the Falklands after an invasion by Argentina.

She won the war with the help of Two Para, a couple of aircraft carriers and, of course, the most powerful tabloid of all, The Growler.

The newspaper was reputed to have ‘sponsored’ the torpedo that sank the cruiser Belgrano, by paying one of our Jolly Jack Tars to chalk ‘Gotcha Galtieri from The Growler’ on the side of said missile.

No wonder Bert was in the running for a knighthood.

He didn’t know it yet but that morning when Bert Bobbins strolled into the Fleet Street offices of The Daily Growler was to be the beginning of his downfall.

As Bert strode towards his palatial office, a smile of self-satisfaction on his face, Mrs Helena Bobbins was executing a plan that had been years in the making.

Nighty Knighty

Bert bowled into his office with the energy of a man who debates nothing. He hung his coat and hat, revealing a snazzy double-breasted Italian suit, silk shirt, ridiculously wide tie and a set of trademark red braces.

The office was dripping with wood panels and dominated at one end by a huge bay window overlooking Fleet Street and from whose extreme right end you could see St Paul’s.

At the other end was Bert’s desk, a vast mahogany affair big enough to land aircraft on. Above it was a vast portrait of Her Majesty, flanked by two enormous Union flags.

In one corner was a cocktail cabinet creaking with expensive scotch and other booze. On his desk was a beaming picture of Bert at Brands Hatch, centrepiece the Ferrari, alongside Jackie Stuart and Stirling Moss. Bert’s office would have done credit to any tinpot ambassador to the Court of St James.

He looked down towards the picture window to the entirely white team of middle-aged execs seated around the room awaiting his pleasure. This was the daily conference, the point where they collectively agreed on the contents of tomorrow’s newspaper. Or rather where Bert dictated them.

‘Right. First thing’s first. Did we get the free crisps for every reader?’

He stared at Digby Darville, the old Etonian marketing director who was looking decidedly more nervous than usual.

‘Er not yet, I’m afraid, Sir. We had some problems with…’

Bert cut him off.‘I want four million bags of cheese and onion! I want this sorted by tomorrow or you, the man with the double-barrelled name, will be out the fucking door. Gottit?’

‘Double-barelled name, sir?’

‘Digby FUCKING-Darville. Now fuckoff.’

Digby nodded weakly and slid shamefully out the door, scribbling furiously into his notes as he departed..

‘Right, News. What happened with that killer bug ate my face story? Is the kid still alive? I want pictures on 1, 2 and 3. Spin up the nurses who’ve been caring for him - hearts of gold weep for the boy whose face turned to goo. Put Lucas on it, he’s got kids.’

New Zealander Miranda Brittle, the News Editor, nodded and took another note. She spoke in that Kiwi voice that we all know and love.

‘We hiv an ixclusif on the kid who was mirdered at the weekend in the sticks. Main suspick is a teacher frim the local primary…’

‘Clean around the neck, the kid? Not scum?’

‘Looks respiktible so far.’

‘Run it as a colour piece for the weekend supplement. Need a bit of chair-fecking-scuro in the paper today - too much crime floating about…and a bit too much pus too with the killer bug.’

‘We’ve also got a piece on the black guy who chased a robber who’d beaten up a 92-year old woman.’

‘Pictures?

‘Yes, we have the black guy and the granny.’

‘Splash with the granny. You’ll never sell a newspaper with a black face on the front. Next…Bingo?’

Bingo Man looked up cheerfully.

‘Well, we’ve got a rollover from last week so it’s a million pound jackpot tomorrow.

‘Odds of a win?

‘About fourteen billion to one, Boss.

‘Love it. Great work. Slap a big blurb on the front. ’

And so it went on. Bert whizzed through the features section, women’s supplement - One Hundred Ways to Turn Him on in the Bedroom, with suitably saucy pictures - then finance - secrets of the supermarket money-off coupon millionaires. This was Bert’s idea of ‘aspirational’ journalism for the masses.

When it was all over and the execs had departed, Bert sat at his desk, his arms spread, fingertips on the mahogany top and allowed himself a smile of utter triumph. The phone rang.

‘Good morning, Mr Bobbins.’

It was his his rather nubile 19-year-old secretary, a former Miss Blackpool. ‘I have Lord Dalwhinney on the line for you.’ Dalwhinney was his main conduit into the corridors of power and the upper levels of Establishment. He was also The Growler’s owner.

“Put him through, love,” said Bert.“Good morning Albert, my dear chap. Sorry to be the bearer of rather bad tidings this morning.’ Every syllable oozed public school privilege and the tone of a headmaster addressing the boys.

Bert’s shoulders sank.

Going out with a bang

While Bert was soaking up the disappointment of his lost Knighthood, Helena was back at the house in Stockbroker Belt waiting expectantly. She had spent years pulling her little plan together, dealing with the same villains who had arranged the Ferrari for Bert.

She had also been around all the tabloids with an entire dossier on Bert’s dodgy property deals, weird sexual tastes and managerial lunacy. She was now confident the Sunday tabloids that weekend would lap it all up.

Helena had married Bert for his money for sure, but more importantly, for the power he wielded. She was the classic Page Three girl, busty and petite with blonde hair and the archetypal dizzy look she could make work in any photograph. But Helena was not dizzy in any sense.

After a year of marriage she had grown to despise Bert for his crude manners, his bullying nature, and his outright disdain for anyone he considered beneath him, which included almost everyone.

Her goal was to destroy him completely, and today was the day.

Helena had played the part of the shallow, spendthrift wife perfectly. Bert, in his arrogance, never suspected that the Spanish lessons, the extravagant shopping sprees, and the string of boyfriends - all of whom were Antonio Banderas look-a-likes - were a ruse.

Beneath her glamorous exterior was a woman driven by a thirst for revenge, meticulously crafted on a man who had humiliated and controlled her and so many others.

She had been on the phone all morning. One of the calls was from her lawyer, confirming the divorce was now final as was the settlement. Over a million quid when she last looked.

As a consequence, she was now working her way through a bottle of bubbly and dancing around the house in her silk nightie, the hifi blaring South American hits of the 1970s.

Bert had been such a bellend. She was tired of his ludicrous clothes, his arrogance, the appalling treatment he dealt out to those around him and the way he pampered that car above else. She also knew he had been banging the former Miss Blackpool for over a year.

The doorbell rang and a slightly squiffy Helena opened it to greet Ernesto Silva. ‘Buenos días, cielo mío,” she purred, kissing him passionately and pulling him towards her.

“Mí vida, we don’t have time for this. I have work to do and we have to move very quickly. Be ready to go in 30 minutes.”

Ernesto was a tall, handsome man of about 35 and looked like - well, Antonio Banderas, to be honest. His parents were from Naples and had migrated to Argentina when he was very young. He spoke in the musical sing-song Spanish that is typical of the country.

For the past six months, he had been living nearby and giving Helena lessons in Spanish, as she called it. Some of those ‘lessons’ were quite intense in nature and, as a consequence, Helena spoke Spanish almost as well as he did, among other skills she had taught him along the way.

He too had his plans, just as Helena did.

He was carrying a substantial canvas bag on his shoulder, which he laid on a sofa and from which he extracted a forensic-style, paper overall, pulling it on over his t-shirt and jeans.

As a final touch, he snapped on a pair of latex gloves.Ernesto opened a side door from the hallway to the twin garages. Helena had given him a spare set of keys to the Ferrari.

He sat at the steering wheel briefly and carefully considered what he was about to do.He took a large wrapped parcel from his bag. Opened the boot, at the front on this model, and for another 30 minutes was busy at his work.

He added one final, written flourish to his masterpiece then moved quickly out to the drive.

Helena, still drinking champagne from the bottle, but now dressed in jeans and a t-shirt was sat in the passenger seat of the stolen, soft-top Mercedes that Ernesto had arrived in. He jumped in over the driver door, revved the car wildly and set off, the tyres squealing. Helena squealed too. Woo-hoo!They would be travelling under new identities.The car would be found burnt out on the empty top storey car park a few hours later. This was long before the days of CCTV and auto number plate recognition.

As Helena had discovered almost a year ago, Ernesto was no language teacher. He was former Teniente Ernesto Silva of the Argentinian Navy, honourably discharged a year before, after he survived the sinking of the General Belgrano by the British submarine Conqueror.

Some three hundred of his colleagues had not been so lucky, among them his lifelong friend Cabo Principal José Guillardo. He had drowned, trapped behind a watertight door and went down with the ship. Helena knew this and saw a great opportunity for both of them.

Two hours later, at the gate for a mid-morning flight to Buenos Aires, Ernesto picked up a so-called burner phone from his bag, pushed a few numbers on it and knew that very soon, something wonderful would finally happen. He said a little unspoken prayer for his lost friend.

As the aircraft began its final approach for landing over the River Plate many hours later, Bert’s neighbours were woken by a loud bang and flash of flame. They looked out of their windows and could see a fire engulfing his garage and large parts of his house. By early evening, the fire was out and the area declared a crime scene.

Days later, Bert found himself picking through what was left of his home. As one of her final acts, Elena had cancelled both the house and car insurance. He was ruined.

The debris had been mostly cleared by police. Bert wandered out into the front garden. He noticed part of a red Ferrari door panel hidden in the hedgerow. It had barely been damaged.

Weeping for his loss, he looked down and saw something scratched into the metal. Bert strained to read the scrawled words.

His eyesight was failing, so he put his reading specs on. ‘Gotcha back’, it said.

6. The Rock

When rich villains have need of poor ones, poor ones may make what price they will
William Shakespeare

Gibraltar juts aggressively from the surrounding plain, looking almost proud of its grimy pubs, generally dreadful food, traffic jams, indifferent weather and British military traditions.

The Spanish call it El Peñon. In English, the Rock.

The morning sun bathes its Eastern coast in sunshine and leaves it in dense shadow in the afternoon as it tracks across the peninsula.

On some winter days, with clouds settled over its steep inclines, lashed by rain and wind and with aircraft desperately trying to land on the short single runway, you could imagine it to have been towed out from the Midlands into the Mediterranean by Brits ruggedly determined to export their sad, sorry climate.

Some who grind out their working lives in Gib for gambling or accountancy firms refer to it as Mordor, the dark evil city from the Tolkien books.

Ironically, many Brits who have never visited still think of this small peninsula as an island.

Joey Bagglietto knows better. He is a Llanito, a native of the area and speaks perfect Spanish and slightly less perfect English.

In his line of work, life is an almost daily to and fro across the land border into Spain.

His tiny living room is his workshop, a blinking mass of computers, monitors, network switches and routers. He works there and lives in the tiny kitchen and single bedroom that remain. His neighbours have no idea what he does, but the block’s electrical circuits have blown out at least three times in the past year.

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Our office was known as the Black Lubyanka, after the Cold War headquarters of the KGB, but the building was home to one of the greatest newspapers of the 1950s and 1960s, The Daily Express.

The title was known worldwide, so much that it featured extensively in the feature film, the Day the Earth Caught Fire (1960). Even today, it is not bad for a B-Movie and the real-life editor of the newspaper, Arthur Christiansen, had a cameo role.

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I was gobsmacked that the new manager of the English football team, Lee Carsley, could be criticised for deciding not to sing the British National Anthem at a match the other day.

I remember as a boy of 12 being taken to the The Royal Opera House or some other stupid place by my school and refusing to stand for that awful dirge - again - like Carsley - being of Irish heritage.

As a child, I was booed by those around me. It probably had a lasting impact. No, not probably. Certainly.

God Save the King or Queen or whoever has not and never has been my anthem. My parents were Irish working people who were forced to come to London. They suffered greatly in their short lives trying to make a living. They lived in atrocious conditions, even by the standards of the 1960s.

I did not understand why anyone would expect me to stand for the anthem.

It is time to get rid of it, in my view. Or at least get rid of the words, as the Spanish did.

Or change it for something more poetic and creative, such as Jerusalem - but this would not work for Scots, Irish or Welsh people I suspect.

The whole concept of national anthems is a bit of a 19th century thing. Along with nationhood.

The world has moved on, theoretically at least.

Yes, it is quite stirring to hear Uber Alles or the Marseillaise - but the words are not the sort of thing we need in the 21st Century.

Generally, they are xenophobic, bloody and imperialist in nature.

The people who migrating these days are focused on where they can raise a family and earn enough money to survive.

Increasingly this means moving to the Ruhr in Germany, the Paris Basin, Barcelona or Madrid’s Metropolis, the Malmo-Copenhagen area or, finally, London, that attraction of last resort.

Educated people no longer have an allegiance to any particular nation, in my view, and that is precisely why national anthems are out of date.

Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, is in one way a constant reminder of our history and culture. In another it reflects Britain as it is today, which is as a city of drugs, homelessness and what appears to be a widening gap between town and gown.

On a Saturday afternoon in the centre of town, you see the homeless sprawled in doorways everywhere. Teena…

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I am getting very tired of millionaires and billionaires urging people like myself to go back into the office. From my personal point of view, working from home has been the biggest positive change in working life since I started 45 years ago. I am definitely not a millionaire, I can assure you.

Most recently Nigel Farage, hot off the trot with his latest electoral gains, is promising to end the concept of working from home for anyone in local government. I would love for someone to reveal how often he is in the office.

Other corporate loons include Lord Rose, former boss of M&S and Asda. He said it was not a satisfactory way of working, ‘particularly in…a fast-moving consumer goods industry.’

Maybe he just resents the fact that many ordinary people no longer need to doff their cap to him in the lobby. Or maybe he doesn’t like the fact that employees have voted with their feet to leave his domain.

He is not alone. Working from home has been the subject of threats and admonishments from a host of companies - Santander, Amazon, Apple and a few of the big investment banks in the US.

Ironically, it is companies like Amazon, Apple, Google et al who have created the world of home working with the technology they have built. Mobile phones in particular have so much computing power now that I am not even sure I need a laptop much of the working day any more.

Bosses cite the need for team togetherness and creativity - even though before the pandemic, more than a few of them consistently undermined any sense of togetherness by sacking selected people. Creativity? I don’t think so.

These days, I avoid the dreadful commute, I have a beautiful working environment and I am able to flex work demands against life demands when required. I recognise I am fortunate and that not all jobs can be done in this way. However, I hope that I am the thin part of a big wedge that will ultimately improve the lot of all of us non-millionaires.

I am sure Karl Marx, were he around, would have a few things to say about all these capitalists trying to get people back in the office. He would stress their need to control workers, which is far easier to do when they are all in the same place. He would also cite the bosses’ need to maximise the value of office spaces, which is, after all, a capital investment for many of them.

Others cite the negative impacts of large portions of the working population working from home. Public transport systems are often mentioned - if nobody is travelling to work, how can they make money? What about all the restaurants and cafes that used to thrive on commuter traffic?

Well, that is not really my problem. Big corporations always bleat when there are changes. They plead for less legislation when it suits them and scream for more legislation when they face ‘unfair’ competition.

I don’t recall restaurants or public transport systems taking any account of my needs before the pandemic - on the contrary, they fleeced me then and they still do. They all need to wake up and start behaving differently.

Karma is a wonderful thing. How do you feel on this?

I’ve driven across Spain more times than I can recall.

I first did it in 1981 in a 13-year old VW Beetle with my newly wed wife. Back then, the roads were unpredictable, often unlit and unmarked and with …

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The Troubles were a period of roughly 40 years when Catholic and Protestants, Nationalists and Unionists, fought each other and the British Army, with bombs, bullets, Aramalite rifles and tit-for-tat killings.

Two of my friends from school joined what was then the Royal Greenjackets immediately from Sixth Form, as Junior Leaders. They served in Northern Ireland at the high point of what was, in all but name, a small-scale, long-running Civil War.

Both ended up deserting within 12 months, serving time in military prison. From what they told me, a tour of duty in Northern Ireland for Squaddies like them was pretty tough and could last over a year at the time. This was later reduced because the wear and tear on the troops was just too much.

Their lives, from what I gather, were often spent in ultra hidden Observation Posts (OPs), pissing in lemonade bottles and living in fear of discovery all the time. They would often find themselves hiding in rooftops or roof spaces, terrified of coming under attack.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I have just watched both movies. ‘71 is told from the British Army’s viewpoint mostly. The other is told from the perspective of a little boy, Kenneth Branagh himself, who grew up there around the same time. They are quite different films and perhaps it is wrong to judge them together. But I am going to do it anyway.

One is filmed in period colour, ‘71. The other is told entirely in black and white and is reminiscent of Roma, directed by the Mexican genius Alfonso Cuarón, but does not come anywhere near its level of artistic achievement, in my view.

I have a lot of time for Kenneth Branagh. His Shakespeare productions are amazing - I was recently moved to tears watching All is True, a film I wholeheartedly recommend but I wonder whether Belfast takes him out of his comfort zone. The film tries too hard to be authentic in my view. The sets look unreal. The violence looks timid and staged. What might be frightening is not. There is a sense that Branagh was trying to recreate a version of Roma mashed up with Cinema Paradiso. Nostalgic, sentimental but not authentic.

In ‘71, on the other hand, there is a real sense of violent authenticity from the moment the squaddies set down in their improvised barracks.

Sinister intelligence men prowl around the building at night, sporting those 1970s moustaches we all know and love. The colour has the look of my old family slides, Kodachrome or Ektachrome, with dark blacks, sharp greens and rich reds. Everything goes wrong on the platoon’s first patrol and our wide-eyed recruit, a young Jack O’Connell, ends up weaponless and on the run across Catholic and Protestant areas.

I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen ‘71, but a high sense of tension permeates the entire movie. Jack O’Connell is the innocent set loose in a world where intelligence men help terrorists make bombs, where children know a thousand ways to escape the police or army and where poverty is grim and desperate.

I can’t recall many films that capture the Troubles in such an authentic manner as this - maybe the TV series Harry’s Game from the 1980s - but I can’t name many more.

So I think that Belfast is a very rare movie - one that Kenneth Branagh did not get quite right. It’s a shame.

I find myself comparing it to the old 1970s Olympus XDA that I have - it is not quite as small but…

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He used to joke about Hemingway’s macho image, the gun-toting, hard-drinking, man’s man. But we both knew Hemingway was so much more that.

I quickly gleaned some early insights into the tight, terse style which Hemingway espoused - a template for many 20th-century novels that followed.

I fell in love with the subject matter - I remember being blown away completely by For Whom the Bell Tolls, a story that amplified and echoed my own love of all things Spanish.

It is also to Hemingway that I owe my love of the bullfight, which has lasted to this day. Hemingway understood the bullfight better than anyone, Spanish or Gringo, with all its savagery and uncanny beauty. 

Hemingway’s style is the thing that still fascinates me. I had been studying English Literature so I was very familiar with Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Dickens and poets such as Tennyson and Wordsworth. These came from a world quite different to that of Hemingway.

He was a voice distinct even from his peers - a true successor to modernists like Joseph Conrad, for example.

Hemingway’s work was concise. Action, silences, not much else. Unlike Conrad, there was very little inner dialogue - but there was passion in bucketloads. Characters could be judged by what they did and through that their motivations became apparent.

He called it the Iceberg Theory - a small amount visible on the surface, with masses of unseen activity going on below.

Hemingway’s style was strongly influenced by the First World War experiences that led to The Sun Also Rises, curiously the one major novel I haven’t yet read.

He felt the war had destroyed the need for flowery phrases and the exposition of inner dialogue. His characters were often hard-boiled, sometimes cynical, often battered by life. 

Harry Morgan, the down-at-heel skipper in To Have and Have Not, echoes that perfectly when he says: 

I’m playing a machine now that doesn’t give jackpots anymore. Only tonight I just happened to think about it. Usually I don’t think about it.

His style made for prose that was epic, taut and cinematic in its vision. It is no coincidence that many of his greatest stories were to become movies - think of Death in the Afternoon, The Dangerous Summer, To Have and Have Not, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Sun Also Rises and, of course, The Old Man and the Sea, with Spencer Tracey. Such a wonderful actor.

Hemingway’s influence can clearly be seen in later Hollywood films that had no connection to him, such as Casablanca, where the world-weary hero displays a cynicism towards everything. Ultimately his actions speak far louder.

He also gave us a global vision. His novels were not set in twee drawing rooms, metropolitan bars and restaurants. They were set in Kenya, Spain, Cuba and Italy, where the landscape often became another character in the narrative. Often, there is a clash between the past and present - particularly in his novels set in Spain.

Hemingway gave us a view of the world that was more befitting the fast, violent, industrial energy that was driving the new century. He also inspired dramatists like Orson Welles, I am pretty sure, who was a great friend of his. Hemingway’s characters also tended to have a real impact on the world one way or another, like Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

It is fashionable today to see Papa as a bloodthirsty alpha male, with his love of the bullfight, safari shoots and deep-sea fishing.

Personally, I see him as a a hugely empathetic author who depicts human life in all its folly, stupidity, bravery and virtue. It is no surprise he developed an affinity for the paintings of Goya - there is an excellent article on this by John Meyers that is well worth reading.

The connection with Hemingway and Spain will probably be with me until the day I die. Papa is a clear influence on many, many other authors and novels that I love - Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, for example, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mocking Bird and the work of Raymond Chandler, which took the iceberg theory to new levels. Faulkner was a close friend, as was the much under-rated John Dos Pasos and James Mitchener.

Hemingway was a journalist who became a novelist. He inspired me to take up journalism as a career. He nurtured in me a love of Spain that has lasted more than 40 years. He indirectly led me to the love of my life and espoused a philosophy that was both noble and dark, savage and beautiful at the same time.

Yes, in his latter days, he was difficult to be with. There were good reasons for that, which can be understood in this wonderful documentary on his life. But I have always had a soft spot for him, whatever his age. His was the true voice of the 20th century.

If you get a chance to read anything by him, do so. Here’s to you, Papa.

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It’s not the biggest museum you will ever visit but it is one of the most amazing spaces I’ve visited so far this year.

Oxford’s Natural History Museum is almost an exhibit in its own right, with a huge glass and iron vaulted roof that towers above a masterpiece of Victorian architecture supported by exquisitely crafted columns and arches.

If the building itself is not enough for you, it also houses skilfully displayed collections of dinosaur and other animal skeletons and stuffed animals such as the otter and bear, pictured.

This is very much the archetype of 19th century museums, designed by Irish architects Thomas Newenham Deane and Benjamin Woodward. It opened in 1860 and is now a Grade 1 Listed Building.

There are plenty of places to find out more about the place and its collections so I won’t repeat all that here - but I will give you a few links that may be useful to find out more.

• Museum website - https://www.oumnh.ox.ac.uk

• Oxford Megalosaurus - https://www.oumnh.ox.ac.uk/megalosaurus-0

• The Oxford Evolution Debate (hosted in 1860 at the Museum) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Oxford_evolution_debate

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They carried huge and heavy SLR cameras, lenses, flash guns and big tripods, went back to a darkroom after their assignment and printed up black and…

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