When the Saxons first ventured up the stretch of water we know as the River Stour, the surrounding land was an unspoilt wilderness of fertile land and wild fowl.
The settlement that came to be known
Continue reading →When the Saxons first ventured up the stretch of water we know as the River Stour, the surrounding land was an unspoilt wilderness of fertile land and wild fowl.
The settlement that came to be known
Continue reading →The Twitterati. The word has even made it into the Oxford dictionary. Because nobody ever wrote anything down until humans learnt to dance a jig on double jointed thumbpoint whilst having breakfast with a lover that they
Continue reading →What arrant nonsense have the hacks that write our Tabloids ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ come up with now? What balderdash-on-stilts is served today?
When the Sunday Pictorial was launched in 1915, Lord Rothermere said that the idea was
Continue reading →It has been quite a good week for the Justin Welby, the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. Quite unexpectedly and out of the blue, he launched his attack on so called “pay day loan” companies, such as
Continue reading →The most poignant news of the week for me was that of the retirement of James Alexander Gordon. Many Raccoonistas have something of an aversion to sport, but Gordon was a man who rose far above mere sport,
Continue reading →814, 359 employers in Britain are so keen to find employees that they have signed up to a European initiative that pays a bounty of 1000 euros to anybody in another European country who is
Continue reading →Today, the lord chief justice, Lord Judge, sitting with Justice Rafferty and Justice Macur, will decide whether the 15-month jail term that Stuart Hall received after pleading guilty to 14 counts of indecent assault, on girls as young
Feckless, Unrepentant,
O come ye, O come ye to Welby.com
Come and behold Him,
Born the King of Tallymen;
O come, let us adore Him,
O come, let us adore Him,
O come, let us adore Him,
Christ, Good Lord….the bloody world’s gone mad.
Jesus
Continue reading →Whether you believe that austerity IS working or not depends on your definition of a desirable outcome. If it was to ensure that the ‘trickle down effect’ relieved poverty amongst the sofa resident young, or poured more
Continue reading →Before I started writing this, I played a segment of ‘Exposure’ back to myself. Within the first few minutes I was listening to yet another lie – the story of ‘Sarah’ allegedly portrayed by an actress both
Continue reading →It is on its way! And by the time of posting may well be with us, in what the occasionally (only very occasionally) waggish Piers Morgan called on twitter “an Ashes birth” – over by tea
Continue reading →Last week, a focus group of Dentist’s assistants in Sunderland told Cami-knickers’ re-election agent that pensioners had had it too good for too long – before the week was out we had sound bites galore as to
Continue reading →Eight years ago, James Adams was a male nurse working with ‘vulnerable adults’.
Something occurred in his workplace, we are not told what, which resulted in him uttering a ‘swear word’ directed at one of his
Continue reading →Magda Romanska – a long post, and an excellent read – ‘How I Survived Socialism’!
Duff and Nonsense on Damn statistics.
Macheath on true love 2013 style
Continue reading →Good Heavens Britain! Did the clouds part and the sun peek through for five minutes? Every newspaper in hysteria mode!
Mothers ‘mortified’ because they thought they could put a four week old baby out to bake on a
Continue reading →Long ago, Equitable Life had a canny scheme. ‘Give us your money now, and we’ll give it back to you with a bit extra when you are older’. And lo! many wealthy people with money to spare
Continue reading →Lately I have been frothing a lot and jiggling about in a most agitated manner. Some have put this down to the hot weather – most unexpected in a summer – coupled with too much excitement
Continue reading →Who knew that Trayvon Martin had morphed from this angelic picture of a 12-year-old into a 6’2″ 17-year-old body builder? Were there no up to date photographs of him to plaster the country with? No matter, he has
Continue reading →I spoke yesterday of the vast volume of mail I am receiving, since starting to write of the Savile case. Some makes me angry beyond belief – and as if by magic, one such arrived overnight. The writer is
Continue reading →I had not thought when I first put pen to paper on the Savile affair, that it would still be lustily gorging every spare moment of my time months later. I doubt very much that the handful of 70s
Continue reading →Death twitches my ear. “Live,” he says, “I am coming.”
~ Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), Minor Poems, Copa
‘Jam tomorrow’ is the meme that gets us all through today. It is what makes us say to ourselves ‘five
Continue reading →Several weeks ago, the Daily Mail ran a story concerning two women who had ‘fleeced’ their aunt of £200,000. The Mail gleefully listed the Rolex watches and named the designer handbags the women had bought,
Continue reading →The Urban Dictionary describes the word ‘Pants‘ thus: Adj. British slang. Not good; total crap; nonsense; rubbish; bad; woefully inadequate; useless; a waste of time and space.
I just thought I’d mention that before
Continue reading →Abu Omar ibn Mahmoud ibn Othman al-Filistini used to live in a dusty fly blown house in downtown Amman. He shared the house with his wife, three children, his elderly parents, and 18 other individuals all related by
Continue reading →Dear People of the Internet and Raccoon Readers,
I am writing to you in search of help and advice and consolation, because it seems that I have lost, or rather been locked out of what
Continue reading →As I write, the collective minds of most of the world’s news organisations are nervously eyeing their holiday bookings and remaining within travelling distance of an airport as they wait to go into full-on tribute mode as Nelson Mandela
Continue reading →Ohrwürmer, that’s Tom Watson’s problem. Ohrwürmer.
There he was at Glastonbury, not a mirror in sight, snapping his fingers and striking the ‘attitude’, quite convinced that he was still an idealistic 18-year-old. The charismatic rhetorical odes to
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