Mick, a proper gent – I’ll miss him Mick Woollett (easy to remember the name, double everything except ‘e’ and ‘w’) died on Monday. He was my editor at Motor Cycle Weekly in the ‘seventies and early ‘eighties. He was mature in every sense of the word, made editor in his early fifties and a proper gentleman, having to work with an office-full of (mostly) youngsters. He never lost his cool, was unfailingly courteous, never swore and was always perfectly mannered. Extraordinary. I plan to get a lot more off my chest about Mick, but for the moment I’ll leave you with this, true, story from, about 1982. MCW had one mouthy sub, a Kiwi called Brendan who was always shouting off about everything. He knew everything, was witty, but packed full of bluster and b**s**. In the run-up to the Daytona Speed Week one year he’d been shouting the odds about how HE ought to join the team because of all his experience, skills and how he’d do a better j...
Will the House of Lord kill off any chance of us having a vote on Europe? I hope not, because nothing would give us a stronger platform to reform the whole bloated undemocratic mess that’s slowing strangling us. But how sickening to see the oily peer, ‘Lord’ Mandelson – a former EU Commissioner due to collect an EU pension, trying to kill off the referendum bill. He says a vote would be undemocratic! He and a clutch of Labour peers are out to kill off Tory peer Lord Dobbs’ bill. Dobbs, of course, says the referendum is actually ALL "about democracy". Scandalously, Mandelson says a referendum would be a "lottery". Ever populist, Boris Johnson exposes Labour peers as undemocratic themselves, for opposing a referendum. See here, www.telegraph.co.uk The UK Independence Party agrees Lord Mandelson is wrong. "How can David Cameron talk tough in Brussels when at the same time he is saying that he will do anything to keep ...
I’m thinning out what passes for my library. Here’s a list. Get in touch if you want anything. In a few days they’ll be going to a charity shop… Chris · Elements of Marketing, A R Morden, 1993 · Eats, Shites and Leaves, A. Parody · Concise Etymological Dictionary, hardback, Oxford, as new! · Neither Here nor there, Bryson · The Lost Continent, Bryson · Notes from a big country, Bryson · And I’ve discovered I have a spare copy of Mother Tongue, Bryson. It’s something worth referring to day-n, day-out (if I’ve used those hyphens correctly) Riding the iron rooster, Paul Theroux Blue highway, William Least Heat ...
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