YEARLY ARCHIVE: 2020
FOOTBALL, WATER CARRIERS AND WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER, EVER EMPLOY A ROCK STAR
September 1996 saw Manchester United come up against Juventus in the group stages of the Champions League. More intriguingly it saw United’s French superstar Eric Cantona come up against his countryman Didier Deschamps. The battles…
Rebel Ideas Matthew Syed, John Murray Publishers, London, 2020
In his latest offering, our Oxbridge educated author is very keen to trumpet and celebrate the concept of ‘cognitive diversity’ but manages to shoot himself in the foot in the very first chapter. Masquerading under…
Lockdown Ping
I’m proud to say I never lost a game of ping for a full three months. That’s definitely a record for me. Of course, I must reluctantly add, that due to lockdown restrictions, I didn’t…
Jon’s new book
Alphabet Soup for Christmas. Alphabet Soup, by Jon Kaufman, is a collection of sharp polemical poems covering a range of personal, philosophical, historical and contemporary material. It would make an ideal thought-provoking Christmas/New Year gift, and one…
History Lesson
In the beginning, at the dawn of time, all energy exploded into matter And the silence of nothing was spectacularly disturbed With a splish and a splosh and a splatter Though this miracle has probably…
Lockdown
Ever since I can remember And probably much like everybody else I’ve been doing things of grand importance Or so I tried to convince everybody, Everybody including myself. Doing things of great and worldly significance…
Plague Days
A time of plague – no time to play When busy men and women stop their lives and say; Will it be me? Will I be next? Why me, I hear them pray. These are…
Prison Ping: Coaching to a Captive Audience
Got an invitation recently to help out with a table tennis coaching session at one of Her Majesty’s maximum-security prisons. I duly accepted the invitation, grabbed my bat and ball and set off down the…
The power and potential of ping pong & parkrun
When considering the next stages in the rapid development of Brighton Table Tennis Club, I have been reflecting on the parallels between the development of parkrun and the potential realisable for table tennis, with an…