There have been many bizarre situations for which insurance policyholders have filed claims, but what is often most bizarre is the outcome. One well known story is about a burgler who, upon breaking into a house, locked himself into the Read more »
hedge trimming so it’s a good place to start this one. In a perfect world I’d have been cutting my various hedges, a section at a time, when the mood took me but, as ever, I’ve let them get away Read more »
As she walks the red carpet at the Gala screening of the new film, Tamara Drewe, in Bridport in September, writer and illustrator, Posy Simmonds MBE, will be treading the pavements of her forebears. Her grandfather was a vicar in Read more »
We live in unsettled and uncertain times. Forecasting the future has never been particularly easy, but it appears to be even more difficult in 2010. Will the UK Economy grow or shrink next month? Will house prices rise or fall? Read more »
Felix Dennis doesn’t believe he’s going to live to a ripe old age. It’s something he’s been acutely aware of for a very long time. He is now 63 years old, has had at least three very close brushes with death already, and abused his body to such a degree that there is sometimes debate on whether he has lost, not one decade, but two. As we sit drinking a pre-lunch rosé in the kitchen of his flat in Soho, he chain smokes and prowls the room like a caged beast, snatching gulps of fresh air from the tiny veranda he likes to call his London garden. “It’s titchy!” he exclaims, as he gazes across the horizon. “It must be the smallest garden in the world”. One imagines his voice booms across the Soho rooftops, disturbing the occupants of tiny bedrooms, where many past tabloid headlines were born.
With the introduction of America’s Lend Lease Program in 1941 colourful new tractors began to appear on British farmland. At the time work on the small farms of the West Country was mainly horse-drawn, any tractors in use being, most probably, a Standard Fordson being driven by a Land Army girl, a dull green machine with a folded potato sack on the seat to provide a bit of comfort. Now names from the great plains of the American West were shipped over the Atlantic, Allis Chalmers, Farmall, Oliver, Massey Harris, Case, John Deere and Indianapolis Moline. All can be found in vintage tractors parades of today. Odd to remind oneself that the final payments for all that machinery was made just a few years ago in 2006.
“Originally I come from Hythe, in Kent, where I was born 83 years ago. My father was a builder, and I had two brothers and a sister. We lived there until 1940, about the time of the evacuation of Dunkirk. That was when my school was evacuated also, but we went to Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, where it was thought to be a lot safer for children in case there was an invasion. I was there for two years, and when I came back, I started my apprenticeship as a plumber, working for my father. When I was old enough, I registered for National Service.