June, 2021

It’s only a few weeks ago since I first heard of  David Frost, not the one whom Richard Nixon questioned over his fornicating when Nixon himself  was  expected to answer Frost’s questions, but another Effen’  Frost entirely. This  Effer was  attacking the N.I.Protocol  to which the United Kingdom is solemnly committed, and seemed to threaten […]

If you’re familiar with the term ‘phatic communication’ , you’ll know it’s that early part of a meeting where people talk about the weather, ask how’s the husband/wife, children, what’s on telly. It’s the language equivalent of clearing your throat before speaking, getting the communication channels cleared. Last night I watched and listened to an […]

Is it just me, or is there a certain air of desperation building within Loyalism and Unionism around the NI Protocol? First, we have Sir Jeff telling the Irish Government to stop supporting and “cheerleading” the NI Protocol, which sounds simply pathetic to me, and then we have Jamie ‘Bin Lid’ Bryson warning – yes […]

“If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill will existing in the world at the moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by […]

The British Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, just lost his job. Was that because he was a bad Health Secretary, useless at his job? Or because he had an affair (and was it an affair or a one-off clinch?) Jeffrey Donaldson has taken the helm of the DUP. Will he repair the damage? The DUP came […]

Oh the joy of it!  The hunt for anything that would burn in the days when people had little by way of furniture or other possessions, did not deter us children from scouting the back lanes for material for our bonfire. It was the 15th August and practically every street in the Nationalists areas of […]

This TV review first appeared in the Andersonstown News Maybe it’s an entertainment virus with a penchant for politicians, but this past week we had two DUP big beasts grabbing the microphone and giving it their all. In the Europa Hotel,  Ian Paisley was called to the microphone by Van Morrison (BBC ONE). Van the Man had been trying, with little success, to […]

Digital Camera                                                                                                19-17 was always too close to call and too fragile a victory to last. While some passionate Sommeys  likened it to the catastrophic rout at Passchendaele in 1917 more mundane Sommeys, the ones with their boots on the brae, compared it to a typical strife-edge rugger result between those two behemoths  of […]

Pic: Wikimedia Commons AMERICAN BREXIT COMMITTEE  Eighty years ago  aboard the U. S. S. Augusta on Placentia Bay, Newfoundland,  Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt signed a document called the Atlantic Charter.  Recently, in the historically Celtic region of Cornwall, England, President Biden and Prime Minister Johnson re-enacted  that event signing a new Charter reflecting the challenges of the […]

Following the forced landing of the Ryanair flight in Belarus  recently, and the arrest of a passenger, the name Ben Bella came to mind. Ahmed Ben Bella had a similar experience to the passenger, at the hands of officials of the France’s Fourth Republic in 1958. I checked on Ben Bella in Wikipedia. His life and career […]