Oliver Phillips blog from Watford Observer
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Oliver Phillips »
Time to form Friends of the Sun Printers/Engraving Clock Tower?
Posted on 1:30pm Thursday 9th February 2012
IT IS nice to note that one of the last remnants of “the splendour that was Cassiobury”, namely Little Cassiobury, close to the much enlarged former Watford Technical College, appears to have a future.
Oliver Phillips »
Along the Texas Panhandle, teenage memories rekindled
Posted on 1:30pm Thursday 2nd February 2012
IT is popularly known as The Day The Music Died: February 3 1959 and I can remember it as if it were yesterday. As a teenager, I felt we had lost something unique with the passing of Buddy Holly, by far he most innovative of all the first generation rockers.
Oliver Phillips »
The French motorways are something else
Posted on 1:30pm Wednesday 25th January 2012
I WAS a little anxious. We had loaded up the car and the roof-pod with items and added our usual shopping, such as bulk crumpets, baked beans, teabags etc. We do that every Christmas and the Spring holiday when we return for a visit to the UK.
Oliver Phillips »
Traumas, big or small, never seem far from our door
Posted on 8:21am Thursday 19th January 2012
WE tend to suffer some degree of trauma whenever we head back to England. We have so many to see, and appointments to meet, we do tend to run a tight schedule. Over the years we have tried to modulate it in that we progress up and down the M40 rather than hare back and forth.
Oliver Phillips »
Briefly tapping into the source of Da do ron ron
Posted on 1:30pm Friday 13th January 2012
AFTER leaving the Italian restaurant and “de woise guys in the Bronx, Nooo York”, we walked along the main drag to the junction of 147th and Crotona. As it happens, that is just block from 147th and Belmont. The route was one of two moments of nostalgia I had designed to be included that day.
Oliver Phillips »
A day in da Bronx, well it was jest poifect
Posted on 1:30pm Friday 6th January 2012
ONE of our daughters was and still is fascinated by the Mafia. She even took a holiday in Sicily while a teenager and has an encyclopaedia and who’s who of the Cosa Nostra.
Oliver Phillips »
I was guilty of accidental phone hacking courtesy of a crossed line
Posted on 1:30pm Thursday 29th December 2011
I MUST confess to phone-hacking, accidentally. I picked up the phone one morning back in 1965 and dialled 21759 which was the number of Watford FC. The phone clicked and I heard the familiar tones of someone speaking. I was just about to reply when I began to suspect I had a crossed line. Then I realised it was the club chairman Jim Bonser and he was talking to manager Ken Furphy.
Oliver Phillips »
Sometimes the headlines are what they wished the a\ttached article really said
Posted on 1:30pm Thursday 22nd December 2011
IT IS said that it is not just the reporters, but the sub-editors who are to blame for some of the excesses in national newspapers. They are the individuals who receive the reports and whose job on some newspapers is to try and come up with a corny pun, playing on words, rather than giving you the facts in a headline.
Oliver Phillips »
Are we that obsessed with people who are in reality minor achievers?
Posted on 6:51am Thursday 15th December 2011
THE revelations that Charlotte Church was asked to sing at a Maxwell wedding and was offered either £100,000, or a newspaper commitment towards positive publicity, caused me to wonder how far journalism has sunk.
Oliver Phillips »
Phone hacking: what a cosetted time I spent in journalism
Posted on 3:40pm Thursday 8th December 2011
AS A JOURNALIST, I suspect I must have lived a very charmed life in the backwater that is Watford and The Watford Observer. I base this suspicion on the way in which journalists are depicted in various television dramas and I was reminded of this recently when catching up with missed episodes of Wire in the Blood, Frost, Waking the Dead and their successors.
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