RAINING CATS AND DOGS The Spanish teacher at Malvern College – sadly no longer with us – was a delightful chap by the name of Robert Stobbs, whom the boys affectionately called El Stobbo. I remember vividly a conversation I had with him in the Common Room when I was telling him that we were going to Spain for our summer holidays. “Remember,” he said, “When you speak Spanish, imagine you have a hot potato in your mouth.” “Shi, Shenor,” I replied rather facetiously. Then som

In the final comment of my last blog about football club names, I asked the question why Sheffield Wednesday, the last club on my list, were known as The Owls. Almost by return, a friend of mine replied that it was because the club originally played in the Owlerton district of Sheffield. That set my mind racing. What about all the other professional football clubs with odd names? Some research was called for…. At once, I should like to discount two categories: those that sim

Not so long ago, I was challenged to give the full names of every club in the Football League, including the Premiership, that has a suffix appended to their more recognisable names. There are 23. I eventually got 21 of them. The two that escaped me were Rangers and Celtic. How can that be, you might ask, when Rangers and Celtic don’t have any name after their main name; besides they’re Scottish and don’t count. Well, yes and no, or should I say, no and yes. It is true, they

“No society is more than three meals away from revolution.” This saying is generally attributed to Vladimir Lenin – though probably erroneously – when he was tub thumping before the Russian Revolution of 1917, and I was reminded of it when we had a power cut in our village a few days ago. The ‘outage’ (I just love that American term) lasted for five hours and was very annoying. We have no gas supply where we live (we don’t have any street lighting either, but that’s anoth

I am no student of Scottish football, but I do from time to time check the table of the Scottish Premiership and have this season been rooting for Hearts, who currently occupy first place, if only because of a desire to see the historic hegemony of Celtic and Rangers broken for once. Hearts? I know so little about them, which prompted some research on my part. Heart of Midlothian is their correct name. They are the oldest club in Edinburgh, formed in 1874, named after the nov

The new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the last word in design and architecture. In one of the recent televised matches of Spurs playing at home – I forget which one – Gary Neville was commenting on the funereal atmosphere in the stadium. “It’s all so eerily quiet,” he observed, “It just doesn’t feel right.” Now, I have not had the pleasure of attending a match at the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, but I do remember vividly the first ever professional football match I was taken t

I have just been watching the TV series Amadeus about the relationship between Mozart and Salieri, the Italian composer and teacher who lived in the shadow of the genius that was Mozart. Incidentally, I firmly believe that the Italian got a bum rap from the producers of the series as well as from Peter Shaffer, the author of the original play of the same name. Rumours had long abounded, into which the playwright shamelessly burrowed, that Mozart and Salieri had been bitter ri

To those experienced skiers amongst us, the news of the fire in an Alpine bar in Switzerland, though horrifying, will have hardly come as a shock. Most of us will have shaken our heads sorrowfully and privately believed that it was an accident waiting to happen. For 30 years, I organised and ran annual ski-ing trips at Malvern College, and I am too painfully aware how these things go. By their very nature, school ski-ing trips are not up-market; they are invariably cut-price,

“Where’s your helmet, Grandad?” That was the rudest thing that was ever said to me on a cricket field. It was, I think, the last time I played in a match. I had come to the conclusion it was high time to put away my bat for good. Though not yet in my dotage, notwithstanding the reference to being a grandad (many years away from that landmark), I just felt unable to step down a level from professional to club cricket and frankly wasn’t enjoying it anymore. I had come to the cr