The Great Stink of the River Thames in 1858. Recently I attended a lecture given by Professor Sir Chris Whitty at Malvern College. He is an old boy of the school; in fact, I taught him English (briefly – as a very bright boy he was swiftly promoted out of my lowly set). The subject of the lecture was the role of the state in the deliverance of public health and safety. As the Chief Medical Officer for England and the Chief Medical Advisor to the UK Government, he knew of wh

MY ALL-TIME TEAM Shortly before he died in 2001, Don Bradman selected his All-Time World XI, to be revealed to the public only after his death. His choice stimulated much discussion and disagreement and laid itself open to an extreme Australian bias. When you see that seven of the eleven are Aussies, you sort of understood some of the controversy that swirled around his choice. The Don His team: Barry Richards (SA), Arthur Morris (Aus), Don Bradman, capt. (Aus), Sachin

THE STORY OF THE MAN WHO INVENTED TARMAC, SHAMEFULLY NEGLECTED BY HISTORY. Edgar Purnell Hooley (1860-1942) Captain in the 1st Nottinghamshire Battalion Pat Hooley introduced me to ski-ing. He was a Classics Master at Malvern College and ran the school ski-ing trips. One day, not long after I had arrived at the College, he sidled up to me and asked whether I would like to join the ‘team’ supervising the boys on their annual trip to the Alps. Hesitantly, I accepted. As an afic

The A449 Wells Road between Malvern and Ledbury (near where we live) has been closed for over a year now. Initially the closure, to repair the road, was scheduled to last only six months but that date has been repeatedly set back owing to “an unexpected landslip”. Whether the landslip was occasioned by the actual work being carried out nobody is saying. It certainly wasn’t brought about by flash flooding! In the meantime, the sleepy village of Colwall has had to put up with c

The Khyber Pass A recent blog was all about a wall, so I thought I would continue the theme with another story about boundaries, borders, frontiers, lines of demarcation. In my career as a professional cricketer, I have been fortunate enough to play in some extraordinary places, in countries that I would not normally have visited, to say nothing of the many different cricket grounds in this country, the length and breadth of the land. Pakistan was one such place. I had be

“How are you, my friend?” “Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve been distinctly under the weather.” Now, I understood perfectly well what my friend meant but as usual I pondered the origin of that odd phrase ‘under the weather’. It comes, as so many of our idioms do, from maritime slang. It describes the practice of sending seasick or ill sailors below deck, literally under the weather bow, which was taking the brunt of a storm. Thus, the sailor would be protected from the pound

I never had the privilege – or the misfortune; depends which way you look at it – of playing against Garry (note the two r’s, often overlooked) Sobers, but I know plenty who did, and some who played with him. None of them is any doubt that Sobers was the greatest all-round cricketer that ever lived. It is interesting that the recent retirement of Ben Stokes prompted comparisons with another great all-rounder, the South African Jacques Kallis. They are in an exclusive club of

Serena Williams, Wimbledon champion in 2000, 2002, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2016 I cannot have been alone at raising a quizzical eyebrow at the news that Serena Williams, the 23-time Grand Slam singles champion, was intending to make a comeback at this year’s Wimbledon. In the event, it was a short-lived reunion with grass court tennis. She was defeated in the first round by the 20-year-old Australian, Maya Joint, and the scheduled reunion with her sister Venus in the doubles ne

Those of us of a certain generation can remember vividly the Berlin Wall. I was only twelve when it was built in 1961, but I was fully aware of its significance, separating East from West and driving a wedge between freedom and democracy and suppression and totalitarianism. To me – to all of us – the Wall, which was after all just an adjunct to the Iron Curtain, had become a permanent fixture, a symbol of a geopolitical divide that was, and would remain in our lifetime, intac