You walk across the car park, unlock your car and get inside. You start the engine put it into reverse. When you look into the rear view mirror to back out of your space, you notice a piece of paper stuck to the middle of the rear window. So, you stop and jump out of your car to remove that paper (or whatever it is) that is obstructing your view.
As contemporaries of the dinosaur, the crocodiles and alligators we know today have an evolutionary history spanning some 230 million years. But, as the experts say, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, and in relative terms these extraordinary reptiles appear to have evolved very little in this time. However, more recent research suggests that this ‘living fossil’ has developed in the last 20 million years into a sophisticated and successful amphibious predator in a world essentially dominated by mammals
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can.
I did enough Spanish at school to get around
Madrid even today, but have become aware on visits to
Barcelona (and
Bilbao) that the local languages have begun to take some precedence over Castilian.
Answer:
a. Customer's name
B. Customer's partial home address
c. Hotel room number
d. Check-in date and out dates
e. Customer's credit card number and expiration date!
For those of us who are retired, there is no excuse for not being ready for Xmas, seeing as how we have had all that time at our disposal. Furthermore, we baby boomers, who have worked in the professional, public and business sectors, and who are used to project managing the BBC’s Xmas schedule, organising the delivery of 5000 xmas dinners to the elderly, getting a xmas special exhibition ready on time, on budget and in the right place, delivering prawns across the world for xmas starters, on schedule and without mishap through the Bosphorous, should have all it takes to achieve a perfect ‘just-in-time’ Xmas of a quality to astonish and delight all our chums. If only it were that easy!
Camels and donkeys, Arab robes and headdresses, and more than a hint of extremely rich “wise men”– in some ways Christmas in
Dubai
felt rather closer to the original event than murky
England
. But the service at
Dubai
’s Anglican church was something else.
Sheena and I were in
Dubai
to stay with our son and his young family. On Christmas morning we all set off for church
Martin Bell wrote his first book at 57, became an MP at 58 and an ambassador for UNICEF at 62. Not that he didn’t have a more than respectable career before all this, but it just goes to show that life isn’t over till it’s over. In 2000, just before standing for Parliament for the second time (he was narrowly defeated), he was interviewed by the formidable Lynn Barber who noted that he had aged, looked gaunt and hollow eyed and had an alarming tremor in his hands. So it was a relief to see that the 69 year old who opened his front door to me one murky afternoon in November was pink cheeked and pleasantly plump with perfectly steady hands. “They’re all right I think,” he says when I ask him, holding them out for inspection, “Perhaps I was nervous when I met her.”
World 
Not that he didn’t have a more than respectable career before all this, but it just goes to show that life isn’t over till it’s over. In 2000, just before standing for Parliament for the second time (he was narrowly defeated), he was interviewed by the formidable Lynn Barber who noted that he had aged, looked gaunt and hollow eyed and had an alarming tremor in his hands. So it was a relief to see that the 69 year old who opened his front door to me one murky afternoon in November was pink cheeked and pleasantly plump with perfectly steady hands. “They’re all right I think,” he says when I ask him, holding them out for inspection, “Perhaps I was nervous when I met her.”