Category: By-the-byline
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Remembering Mary Stott
Way back when the SDP was a proper party fighting a General Election, I met Mary Stott who arrived at our HQ in an old off-licence in deepest South East London and rolled up her sleeves and stuffed envelopes for our candidate, who was her friend Polly Toynbee, and made tea and talked deep good…
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Well, you never know
I really am surprisingly rubbish at politics. I learnt to read using newspapers, I ran committee rooms for Margaret Thatcher’s first Minister of Health when I was 16, I wrote filler pieces for the Young Conservative newsletter before I’d even left school, before I got out a bit more into the wider world and began…
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Still at it
It’s the time for remembrance. 90 years since the end of the first war – The Great War as my grandparents and great aunts called it. And they had been through it. I watched the remembrance service and it becomes more poignant each year. The story of the mother and sister of a 20 year…
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Statistically speaking
My maths is no good – and I’m not proud of it. I failed at O level (twice) and continue to fail to understand mathematical concepts. I scraped a pass in my economics papers and had to be gently taken through my statistics by a patient and gifted medical statistician who I was working with…
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For heaven’s sake
Currently having rather more time to sit in front of my computer than normal, I picked up this piece on Sarah Palin, the woman who could be one of the most powerful people on the planet should McCain keel over. Despite my previous post on women in power vis a vis Hillary and Margaret Thatcher,…
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Someone to watch over EU
I’m quite a keen European and I’m sorry that the Irish referendum has turned down the Lisbon Treaty. I’m not for a second denying that the EU has many, many faults, one of which I would suggest is their failure to make clear what the Treaty involved. I used to accompany a group of journalists…
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..still hanging on
Alright, now I am quite interested in the US elections. And Hillary is hanging on in there. Strangely enough, I can understand this apparently odd response to Barak Obama’s win. Hillary has been in this for the long haul and giving up on the dream, acknowledging it is over is almost unbelievably difficult. The night…
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Hanging up her dancing shoes?
So, it looks like Hillary’s going to be handing in her pass after today’s primaries. Politically minded friends keep saying how absolutely riveting the competition for the Democratic nomination has been. Which it has of course but which I’ve found very unsettling. I don’t have a deep enough knowledge of the US political scene to…
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My 10 pence worth
I don’t normally do politics on the blog – there are just too many commentators out there and to keep up seems to mean spending a lot of time at the computer – and I am basically a bit lazy about that. But this week has been a real treat for everyone, not only anoraks…
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90 years on
The English department at Oxford University is running a project archiving WWI memorabilia and it’s stirred me into doing something I should have started a long while ago. My great aunt, Bessie Marks who trained as a nurse in 1908 was a WWI nurse posted to Whalley Bridge Military Hospital near Manchester and after her…