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Skimmed Bilk
I was recently taken aback by the prevalence of round-ups for charity when making electronic payments. Just last week, it happened three times in one morning on the High Street, and even sneaky old online retailers are slipping it into their payment processes. It works like this: if your purchases cost £7.84, the screen asks…
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Horses and Stable Doors
Pro-EU acolytes are currently questioning why Brexit is no longer discussed by Brexiters. For the same reason that nobody is talking about Swine Flu: it’s over. The question is settled even if the fallout isn’t, so why hasn’t everybody moved onto the practical reality instead of replaying the pros and cons of the decision? Every…
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It’s Coming Home
So, Euro 2020 is underway, and the immediate focal point will doubtless be the knee-taking that will almost certainly overshadow our chance-taking. We will therefore be showing the red card to racism but getting fervently behind our respective teams, right? Now that raises an uncomfortable question regarding our own comfort with football patriotism. If racism…
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Heart Failure
When Christian Eriksen hit the deck during the Denmark-Finland match, it was a horrible moment. But it was not just the player collapsing, it was also the integrity of much of the viewing public who sprang into life on social media. Yes, while the poor chap lay prostrate on the pitch and in the sick…
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Big Ole Balls
Maya Forstater has just won her appeal at the Employment Tribunal, which has doubtless led to a whole swathe of women scratching their heads. And their big ole hairy balls. In the greatest twist, worthy of a literary genius, the doyenne of fiction JK Rowling has been established as the standard bearer of non-fiction. Who’d…
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Teenage Kicks
The cricketer Ollie Robinson has been yanked out of his England debut because of some boundary-breaching, turdist tweets that he had posted a decade ago. At worst it was throwaway bravado or attempts at humour through extreme shock value, and to be fair, I’ve heard worse from your average grim gaggle of giggling girlies in…
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Cosmetic Surge
It seems like every man and his dog – or rather every person with or without biological testes and their companion – is necking hormone replacement capsules or mindlessly cheerleading for those who do. The question I have is where did all these trans activists come from? The hardcore loonies have always been stumbling about…
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Knee Jerk
Reportedly, Gareth Southgate is to hold urgent talks with the England squad about taking the knee. In all truth, he’d be better off talking to them about taking the piss. That performance versus Austrian opposition would have had Neville Chamberlain’s paper fluttering in the wind. In elite football terms, we’re not waving but drowning. As…
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Southgategate
When I was a lad, parents would buy their kids pet hamsters in order to introduce them to the crushing reality of bereavement. Nowadays, parents whip up excitement around England’s football tournament campaigns to the same end. Yes, it’s that time again when for a few weeks we can deceive ourselves that incompetence and cluelessness…
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Porto Ball Bug
It’s the UEFA Champions’ league final today – an all-English affair, which is taking place in Porto. Fewer than three weeks ago, it had been decided to switch the event from Istanbul because Turkey is on the UK’s travel ‘red list’. So, let me get this straight. In the midst of a pandemic when this…
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Fighting the Good Fight…
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