27th October 2019

Clocks were turned back this morning. The news also constantly looks back. “The people didn’t vote for a No-Deal” they keep telling us. But that’s not what I remember. I can’t understand why the media reiterates the ‘facts’ with today’s hindsight but forgets yesterday’s mindset. What the people were actually saying in 2016, before the referendum, were two things: 1. We’re fed up with Brussels bureaucracy; 2. The UK is tiny and Blair opened the floodgates to far too many global migrants and we’ve lost our British identity. History books always talk about the facts but rarely about what actual people were saying at the time. That’s why it’s so important for young people to talk to the oldest family member and note down their oldest memories. That’s the only way to get a true record. The people are the history far more than the events, which are often spun to suit a different future. And me? Very soon I’ll announce a new novel - set in the past of course! Watch this space...

20th October 2020

I’m off to London for the day to meet my publisher. One place I’ll definitely be avoiding is Westminster. I still believe that the problem with the UK is we constantly show the world our ‘sore toe’, revealing every minute, excruciating detail about our political machinations. I can’t think of any other country, including the US, who would do such a thing in such camera-panning detail. Why do we always ‘wash our dirty linen’ in public?  When we lived in France and watched the excellent France24 news channel, all we saw were nice, posed shots of the president at the Elysée Palace. Similarly, on our frequent trips to the US, despite much  negative publicity about the president, never were we presented with actual, as it happened, minutae of meetings on TV.  We can learn a lot from other nations. Today’s your chance. Read more about France and the US. Download your copy of each of these today only FOR FREE. Don’t sit and stare. Click on the images on the right.

13th October 2019

As I grow older, I spend a lot of time thinking about the past. Recently I gave a book talk where I recounted why my aunt moved to the US at the age of 17 and how she managed to overcome the immense differences between the old English culture and the go-getting American style. She was born in 1906 Birmingham. The family was poor so she was wearing charity boots and clothes until 1924 when she was one of the ‘huddled masses’ arriving at Ellis Island, as described by Emma Lazarus on the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty. In NY she coped with the burgeoning Wall St Crash until slowly, slowly her life improved. An important thing she learned about her new life in the US: no-one was going to help you there. If you were fit and healthy, it was up to you to improve your life, no-one else. That’s something we in the UK need to re-learn today.

6th October 2019

October. Growing up in Birmingham in the ‘50s, it was common to live through terrible yellow smog and choking smoke from local factory chimneys. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Today in the city, the air is clear. Tonight on BBC 2 a programme shows the shrinking glaciers in N. Alaska and Greta cries it’s all man’s fault. Yet no-one asks what caused the ice age and global warming which occurred millions of years before the advent of man. There’s a plethora of, unheard, peer-reviewed climatologists who reveal these phenomena as being caused by complex solar changes. If this is true, Greta should be concentrating on the effects of global warming rather than a cause we can do nothing about. Start by moving man away from low-lying coastal and river areas, evacuate tiny islands in the middle of the ocean and volcanic areas, and build houses on stilts. That’s what Greta should be advocating before it’s too late.