As I mentioned in my previous post, Lord Skidelsky, who died this week, was a member of Forest’s Advisory Council in the Nineties.

Another name on that list was his friend, historian Professor Norman Stone, and the extent of their friendship is revealed in a poignant, beautifully written blog post (Norman’s Last Day) published by Skidelsky a few weeks after Stone’s death in June 2019.

Sorry to hear that Lord Skidelsky has died.

An economic historian best known for his three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, Robert Skidelsky enjoyed a nomadic and occasionally controversial political career. In the 1990s he was also a member of Forest’s Advisory Council.

On April 11, 1986 (40 years ago), I was with my good friend Gary Ling who was part of the Sovereign’s Parade at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

As The Times reports today, the Parade marks the end of 44 weeks of training for cadets who go on to become army officers. Gary, who I met at university in Aberdeen, subsequently spent three years in the army, serving predominantly in Northern Ireland.

Joe Jackson has a new album out tomorrow and earlier this week The Times published an interview with the New York and Portsmouth-based musician.

The headline, ‘We’re in the no fun era’ — Joe Jackson on smoking bans and abstinence’ is a little misleading because it represents just one paragraph in the entire article, but it’s a reminder that, two decades ago, Joe was an outspoken critic of public smoking bans.

We’re going to see Our Town, a play by Thornton Wilder, at the Rose Theatre in Kingston-upon-Thames tonight.

The original play, written in 1938, is set in a small provincial town in America in the early 1900s. I’m looking forward to it because, in January 1976, I was in a school production of Our Town at the Byre Theatre in St Andrews.

Back from the World Nicotine Congress in Brussels.

A brief recap. The WNC is the brainchild of Elise Rasmussen who founded the Global Tobacco Network Forum in 2008 before renaming it the Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum (GTNF).

Today is the 20th anniversary of the smoking ban in Scotland. I vaguely remember spending the day in Edinburgh to handle media requests but beyond that it’s a bit of a blur.

Famously, Scotland’s first minister Jack McConnell was said to be sceptical about a ban until he spent a morning in Dublin in 2004 where he was taken to three or four carefully selected pubs to witness for himself the ‘success’ of the smoking ban in Ireland, which had been introduced a few months earlier

Just arrived in Brussels, via Eurostar, for the grandly named World Nicotine Congress which begins tomorrow.

It’s nice to be back because I used to visit the city several times a year. According to my diary, however, the last time was in February 2020, six weeks before the first Covid lockdown.