Robert Lloyd - a Sir Gar Blog of random news . . . and some Clecs!

TO state the blinking obvious, it’s not so much a mid-life crisis as a spot of ‘old-life’ bother. This week saw something of a landmark birthday. I’ve had my lovely letter from the taxman at HMRC and my state pension is kicking in. As I clutched a small dry (cooking) sherry to celebrate the occasion, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’m turning into something of a penny-pincher. The warning signs are there already – a habit (bordering on OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder) of switching off lights and electrical appliances when they are not needed, and an evening routine of cwtshing up under a rug (in preference to putting the central heating on!). Call it thrift, call it being a Scrooge. Or call it being a miser, tightwad, cheapskate or a penny-pincher. Truth is, I’m now worried that I’m turning into the sort of person I used to laugh at during my younger days. Bit by bit, I’m becoming obsessed with seeking out bargains. The Head of the Household, aka Mrs Lloyd, is convinced it started wh...

HE’S got a name that sounds like a cheap after-shave, but his aroma is starting to seep into the atmosphere of our shores. Which begs the question: should we be worried about Elon Musk? It appears to be hard to ignore the richest man in the world. Someone with a net worth of $400 billion, a place in USA President Donald Trump’s Cabinet and control of one of the world’s busiest social media platforms will probably also have the biggest megaphone in the room. I can’t quite understand how someone who runs SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company and other hi-tech businesses can find the time to express his views on the X platform (Twitter, to old fogeys like me). If you tune in to X, then there’s barely a minute that goes by without Mr Musk chipping in his views on a wide variety of topics. Plainly, there is not enough going on his side of the pond, as Mr Musk has now decided to interfere in UK matters – younger members of the family inform me this is a ‘classic disruption technique beloved of t...

  HERE’S a question guaranteed to divide all sports fans out there: who are the ‘toughest’ competitors in the world? Rugby Union players? Rugby League stars? Tour de France cyclists? Olympic rowers? Marathon runners? Boxers? In nearly 50 years of watching and reporting on different sports, I’ve met and interviewed people from all the above sports. In terms of being the ‘toughest’, none of them come close to National Hunt jockeys. Evidence that they are as tough as teak is provided daily on racecourses around the UK – with the latest example happening at our local Ffos Las track last Saturday. Pembrokeshire’s James Bowen, who comes from a family of fearless horsemen, was the latest jockey to reflect that one second you can be sailing over a hurdle or fence at 35mph, and the next you can be face down in the mud wondering how you’ve narrowly escaped death. Bowen is part of a long line of Welsh jockeys who have diced with death while competing at the highest level in racing. When I was...

  A WISE man once declared, “You can live to be a 100 if you give up all things that make you want to live to be a 100.” OK, I’ll pause there, as it wasn’t a very wise man. It was film director Woody Allen who said it – and he doesn’t get into the Top Three of Wise Men in my book. But . . . that doesn’t mean I don’t agree with the essence of what he said, particularly as I am now in the ‘pensionable age’ bracket. You name it, and I’ve got it – free bus pass, senior railway card, a stent in the ticker, a multi-tiered pillbox for all my medicines, dodgy knees and arthritis in the ankles. With the discounted travel cards, I could hatch an escape plan, but I suspect the legs would let me down and I wouldn’t get very far. Sometimes, I think the travel option may be over-rated as the world seems to come to me, via unsolicited mail and publicity flyers through the letterbox and unwanted emails through the electronic inbox. For example, this week started badly with two flyers. The first su...

  TIME was when I was young enough (and twp enough!) to talk about making a ‘fox pass’. As a young cub reporter, I even committed the cardinal sin of scribbling ‘fox pass’ in a news story. My editor at the time stopped short of a sharp rap across the knuckles with a metal ‘em’ ruler, but the verbal dressing down in the newsroom was enough to make sure I got the message that a ‘fox pass’ is a ‘faux pas’. Faux pas literally means ‘false step’ in French, and that’s a great description of what you do when you make a faux pas. Some dictionaries describe a ‘faux pas’ as meaning a significant or embarrassing error or mistake. In other words, a blunder, a gaffe or a mistake. In 50 years of scribbling, I’ve made several blunders. In fact, during just the last fortnight, I’ve managed to make three. So, if you do that maths, I reckon my faux pas career tally may well be approaching the five digits mark. My three ‘faux pas’ (if that is the correct plural of the phrase) included making an eight...

YOU’RE going to have to trust me on this one – it won’t be bad luck if you read this column today . . . honest . . . promise . . . cross my heart. Yes, it’s Friday the 13 th  (only the second Friday the 13 th  in the 2024 calendar). It’s a fair bet that if you survived the one in September, you’ll manage to get through today – even if I take a little bit of delight in reminding you just how superstitious us human beings can be. There is a medical word for the fear of Friday the 13 th . It is paraskevidekatriaphobia – a word which just sent my spell-checker into overdrive. The word paraskevidekatriaphobia was devised by Dr Donald Dossey, a California-based clinical psychologist who had a sideline as a folklore historian. Dr Dossey would tell suffering patients that they had paraskevidekatriaphobia – but he would cheerfully add, “when you learn to pronounce it, you’re cured!” As it happens, Friday the 13 th  doesn’t bother me that much, but I did take the precaution of writ...

  BACK in July, I was a Bear. For some strange reason, in August, I became a Dolphin. This week, it turns out that I am now a Parrot. Confused? Please don’t lose any sleep over it. Leave the worrying to me. Here’s the explanation: as part of my cardiac rehab regime, I wear a fitness device on my wrist which monitors how many steps I take every day, how my heart is performing . . . and how well I sleep. When you get to my age, sleep is very important. Back in my teens and 20s, ‘pulling an all-nighter’ was an idiom which summed up those occasions when you needed to work or study through the night. Today, ‘pulling an all-nighter’ has a different meaning among the group of oldies I meet for a weekly coffee. A successful ‘all-nighter’ today is that glorious occasion when you manage to get seven straight hours in bed . . . without having to get up to go to the toilet! These are occasions as rare as hen’s teeth and need to be stamped in red on the software app that runs my fitness device....