caughtinthemiddleman

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We Shall Remember Them…

Lest We Forget……

[caughtinthemiddleman]

Lest we forget!

With all the chaos and carnage in the Middle East right now, and, the stupidity of a Home Secretary fanning the flames of hatred at home, I thought it timely to retell the story of my Grandad, Albert William Jones. Albert fought in the First World War in the Palestine campaign taking him from Gallipoli in 1915 through to Constantinople, only returning home in 1919. During that campaign he…

[caughtinthemiddleman]

He broke the law!

He broke the law!

He. Broke. The. Law. in fact, he broke his own law. I don’t care if he was ambushed by a cake or if the party only lasted 10 minutes. He did this when people were dying. He did this when people were isolating. He did this when people could not visit the people who were dying or attend the funerals of those who passed. And. He. Lied. To. Parliament. Repeatedly. And not for the first time. And…

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Let's bend the knee.

Let’s bend the knee.

Does President Trump have a 666 tattoo?

We are not even halfway through but the year 2020 has felt pretty apocalyptical so far.

Remember the fires? Remember the floods? Remember the storms? Remember the wars? And, who can forget the Covid-19 pandemic which continues to ravage the world. So many dead and counting.

It is as if the Four Riders are charging across the world as a portent of the Last…

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Lockdown! “Oooh oooh oooh oooh lockdown!” Well it’s Day 1 of an enforced staycation - my employer has asked everyone to take at least one week during April.

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Behind the curtain.....

Behind the curtain…..

Well, that was an “interesting” trip.

Heathrow was “quiet” this morning. It seemed that there was a masked ball party imminent to which I had not been invited. The few hardy travellers eyed each other suspiciously and held their breath when coming into proximity with each other. The look of disappointment was palpable as duty free shoppers realised that, even here, the shelves were devoid of…

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The Blitz Spirit…. “Daddy what did you do in the Coronavirus War?” “Well son, once the news broke that migrants don’t was their hands, we launched a raid on the 24 hour Aldi.

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Taxis scare me In my experience there are just two types of German taxi drivers. The first is typically middle-aged to older, both male or female, with long grey hair either swept back (imagine Peter Stringfellow) or sporting a pony tail.

[caughtinthemiddleman]

No Career As A Cowboy For Me!

No Career As A Cowboy For Me!

Who knew 7 years ago how close I was to death….

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-51086961

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Humbug! That’s it. I can no longer hold my tongue.  At the risk of being one of the first “Liberal Intellectuals” to be put against the wall, by whichever firing squad of whichever party we allow to assume power through our passivity, I must speak.

[caughtinthemiddleman]

The light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off…. On this day..... Boris the Bullingdon Buffoon was elected as the next Prime Minister of the (dis) United Kingdom by a very small number of very old people still dreaming of a return to the Elysian Fields of the Golden Era when foxes were afraid in their dens, men wore hats, Muslims lived in Muslimshire and Morris Dancers shook their ruggles in every corner of an Empire on which the sun never set (because it shines out of the Buffoon’s very own backside).

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Springtime In Chicago...

Springtime In Chicago…

    The joys of business travel.

Yesterday morning at 04.30 am – a Sunday morning – I “awoke”, showered, dressed, and left the house to drive to Heathrow for my 07.45 flight to Chicago, en route to an industry conference and exhibition in Louisville, Kentucky, in the US of A.

I admit that I was tired – even my brief sleep had been fretful. Even after all of these years of traveling I never sleep…

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Christmas is cancelled....

Christmas is cancelled….

      Let’s just cancel Christmas…..

I am feeling a little bah humbug. The world has gone mad and the festive spirit seems a fair few egg nogs and sherries distant as yet.

Wars continue to rage across the Holy Lands.

Paris, the City of Light, is literally alight with the flames of burning tyres,  burning cars, burning shops, and the fluorescent glare of les gillets jeunes (yellow vests) who…

[caughtinthemiddleman]

Lest we forget....

Lest we forget….

We live in a dangerous time. When superpowers are run by dictators. When the far right is gaining ground across Europe and in Latin America. When pipe bombs are being delivered across the USA and Jews are again slaughtered in their synagogues. In a time when war is but a sound bite on the news, happening somewhere else to someone else. 

We live in a world of Brexit. Of turmoil in Europe, where…

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Incroyable!

Clearly I am much loved by my French work colleagues. So much so that not one of them thought to mention it was a holiday in Paris today.

They didn’t mention it when I sought approval for my travel weeks back. They didn’t mention it when I booked my tickets and they didn’t mention it when I was in the office in Paris on Tuesday (I was in Vienna yesterday).

I discovered it was a holiday in Paris…

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Shopping frustrations....

Shopping frustrations….

I’ve just had a very frustrating trip to Waitrose. 

Now some might say that this was a very generous thing for me to volunteer to do on the weekend. A rare two-day sojourn away from the stress and strain of corporate politics and commercial cut and thrust. Especially as tomorrow, weather permitting (and it can be very dangerous to base one’s social life on the whims and unreliability of the…

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A lasagna recipe for my mother-in-law....

A lasagna recipe for my mother-in-law….

Dear Pat,

I take it as a real compliment that you would ask me how to make a lasagna? You could have asked a student….any student. Or Google…. Or read the side of any packet of lasagna sheets…. but a compliment after all. 

It begs the question as to what was wrong with all of the other delicious meals I have painstakingly prepared for you over the decades but I choose to dwell on the positive.