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Continue reading →: Seiko 7a28 – watchmaking history at pocket money prices
Fancy owning a little piece of horological history? Well, you could head over to Geneva’s Patek Philippe Museum museum with your jemmy, a striped shirt and a ‘swag’ bag and quietly remove their Rieussec Seconds Chronograph. Feeling even braver? How about the earliest chronograph yet discovered? The Louis Moinet, in…
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Continue reading →: Being Santa.
December 18th. Nick Whitelock sat at his desk by the window and looked out as the cold, winter rain tracked its way down the pane. “Sleet, more like.” he thought to himself. He was, as usual, the last one in the office. The rest of them would be in the…
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Continue reading →: Village Remembrance in Bampton
In need of bacon, as one often is on a Sunday morning, I nipped into the Bampton shop just before the village remembrance parade. A young lad, about thirteen I’d guess, walked in and moved, a little hesitantly, towards a spot just in front of me in the queue. The usual…
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Continue reading →: Splat the rat
Most councils use conflict-based ‘traffic calming’ schemes as speed reduction measures and to discourage drivers from using certain roads. They call roads like these – the roads people use to get to work, to go shopping and home to their families – ‘rat runs’. In my own village in West Oxfordshire we have…
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Continue reading →: Time to be practical, not ideological, about transportThere’s been a lot of fuss in Oxford lately about Oxfordshire County Council taking £4m in bus gate fines. Even the RAC has waded in to suggest that the system of fining drivers is ‘broken’. The fines are an issue, but the bigger problem is the ideology that drives so…
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Continue reading →: RAF Manston officers’ mess party tricks. Revisited.
It was in 1993 when she was 70. I’d thrown a party and, of course, Ma was invited too. She wasn’t the sort of mother you’d leave off the invitation list. Not only were parties her natural element, but all my friends adored her. There would have been trouble had she been…
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Continue reading →: Clipping the wings of small business
In yesterday’s double-dip “Emergency” budget, George Osborne announced a new tax that means that one group in society will be paying around £2,000 more from next April. No, it’s not hedge fund managers, multinationals or the ultra-rich. It’s small businesspeople. A reform or just a tax-grab? Sneaked in under the…
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Continue reading →: An open letter to the Chancellor.
Today, George, you delivered your first budget as a Tory chancellor. Those who voted for you – the people who believed Conservatism was about a hand up, not a hand out and who run their own businesses – are now sitting shellshocked, wondering how they could have been so utterly gullible. They should have realised that the die…
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Continue reading →: Say what you mean
Councils and the public sector are very careful about how they use language. This is no bad thing. It demonstrates an understanding that language is massively, foundationally important. The National Council of Teachers of English rightly says “language plays a central role in the way human beings behave and think.” But language can…
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Continue reading →: Up the Amazon without a paddle.
I blame my pal Damon. I’d always coveted his Amazon 131, slowly converted a part at a time for classic rallying. Every so often, he’d send me pictures of it going sideways with him grinning like a loon behind the wheel. The pictures would usually be accompanied by the line…
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Thanks for dropping in. There’s all sorts of stuff here, from reviews of watches to thoughts on driving and riding. And you’re welcome whether you agree with any of it or not.
MMC Musings 