You know that one friend who always misses your birthday? He’ll post on your Facebook page: “Hoppy bthdy Mate 4 ystaday!!! Hope it a good1!!!” And he’ll do that four days after your birthday. Every year. Missing a friend’s birthday is embarrassing, and so it should be. So it’s perhaps a bit ironic that the most famous birthday in the history of the world is missed every year. I’m talking…

Fortune Favours the Bold The Duke of Wellington was an extraordinary man. He had two extremely successful careers – the first in the military, the second in politics – and he invented the gumboot. He received six – count them, six! – knighthoods, and not one of them was for the gumboot, which is surely worth a knighthood in its own right. Arthur Wellesley was born in 1769 in Dublin,…

The game of table tennis has a long and noble history. It began, as ‘ping pong’, as an after-dinner entertainment for upper-class Brits. And while most of us know it as a wet-weather school-holiday diversion in the garage, it is also a highly-competitive professional sport that played a small but influential role in easing Cold War tensions. It’s 1971. The Vietnam War is at its height, with the communist North…

We have a funny old relationship with Halloween here in New Zealand. It’s often seen as a commercial event, and Americanism forced down our throats and not a part of Kiwi culture. But it is much more than that – it is a very old, pre-Christian celebration, and it is certainly not American. Before it was sponsored by The Warehouse, Halloween was celebrated as the Christian festival of All Saints…

“The biggest mistake the Scots made was pausing in Ireland for 400 years on their way to America”. That’s what my  Great-uncle Dunn told me when I was two years old, and I’ve never forgotten. Dunn and the McLoughlins who make up my mother’s side of the family were proud Orangemen, Scottish Protestants who settled in Ireland from the early 1600s. Dunn himself was a US citizen, being born in…

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is now regarded as a classic novel. It’s the story of an extended series of road trips zigzagging across the USA, with a diversion into Mexico, taken between 1950 and 1954. It’s a semiautobiographical tale of Sal Paradise (based on the author Jack Kerouac) and Dean Moriarty, living an indulgent and dissolute life of abandoned partners and children, wife beating, scams, drugs, and, being pre-rock’n’roll, a dedicated…