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All posts by Malcolm Toogood

Once upon a time, there was a bear who missed Christmas every year because he hibernated for the winter.  A hare decided this was sad, so left his sleeping friend a present of an alarm clock, which woke him on Christmas Day.  To do this, he enlisted the help of a Mr Lewis, who sold bits of Christmas to the local folk.   Mr Lewis thought it would be nice to tell the locals all about the hare’s plan, and they became so interested that they twittered about it to their friends far and wide.

the bear and the hare

This generated so much interest that Mr Lewis’ business grew and grew until he felt he just had to make a film about it and, as films have to have a title song, he enlisted the help of a famous songstress to sing it for him.  Mr Lewis played the song in his store, and it so enchanted the people who heard it that they wanted to buy their own copy.  So Mr Lewis manufactured a single that became so popular it topped the Hit Parade.   So where, you may ask, does the Passport come into this.  Well to tell you that part of the story, I need to take you far, far away, to another land – Somewhere Only Jobsworths Know. Continue Reading

So here I am, in the front room of my house watching TV. It’s 7.30pm on Friday 22nd November 2013. Fifty years ago to the minute and the day, I was also sitting in a front room watching TV, but that was in my parents’ house. My mother was crying, my father was sitting dumbstruck as the news came from the small black and white screen. John F Kennedy was dead.

moments in time

When the news of the shooting first emerged just after 6pm that Friday evening, TV programmes were immediately postponed and for the next hour we had a simple message on the screen, accompanied by dirge music, interspersed occasionally by an update from the voice of a newsreader that was only preparing the audience for the inevitable. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we all remember what we were doing, because we had an hour to contemplate what it could mean for the world. For not only was this man a symbol of hope, he was also the first politician in my lifetime who wasn’t old enough to be my grandfather. Continue Reading

Was it any wonder that an Ashes series mired in controversy over technology, and the misjudgement (or more to the point misapplication) of it, should end with the farcical image of two umpires leading the teams from a field bathed in floodlight because, in the judgement of the rules, the light was too bad to continue.

Image source www.news.com.au - click here to visit the site

MIchael Clarke discusses the bad light with the Umpires after appearing to change his mind about continuing

It is one thing for spectators to part with their hard-earned to watch a fifth day that ultimately peters-out to a meaningless draw aided by the capricious English climate; such is the lot of a cricket fan, and ever will be.  But when a match is potentially rescued from such a fate by some positive captaincy, and devil-may-care batting, to lift the crowd towards a memorable climax of a one-sided series, why on earth should anyone want to pull the plug with just minutes left? Continue Reading

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth since Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation, through ill-health, from the job of being God’s chosen representative on earth.  The act itself may have come as a surprise, but not the reaction; after all, if any position should be considered a job for life, surely it is that of Pope.

Pope Benedict XVI announces his surprise resignation during a press conference at the Vatican

However, in these days of career plans and exit-strategies, and with the most popular method of removal in their early days, that of martyrdom (favoured by half of the first sixteen incumbents) being no longer considered  politically-correct, it was obviously time for the church to modernise its HR policies.  Continue Reading

The intriguing thing about the process for arriving at my Album of the Year 2012 is that all but one of my long-list to be whittled down to that final selection was a debut effort, and the other came from an artist that I was previously completely unaware of.  So could this be an indication of yet another changing of the guard?

the short list for album of the year 2012

I hope so, because if we did anything with our ‘Revolution’ of fifty years ago, it was to lay down a marker that the music scene should never be allowed to become predictable.  Neither should it be the domain of what purports these days to be the NME, where anything is simply uncool if produced more than five minutes earlier, or if not made by an artist considered as a legend simply because they have never submitted to a decipherable interview. Continue Reading