Mark Solomons

There’s a saying – the kind seen on ‘inspirational’ posters on the walls of HR departments – that claims: ‘It’s about the journey, not the destination.’ Clearly it was dreamed up by someone who has never flown from Stansted and found themselves jostling through crowds of stag and hen parties, newly arrived Polish workers (there’s even been an Essex-based Polish taxi service to pick them up) and the hordes descending on Burger King as soon as they come through arrivals like John Mills and co. supping their first lagers after trekking through the desert in Ice Cold In Alex. It’s not just Stansted, of course. Gatwick – or ‘Chavwick’, as I’ve heard it called – is just as bad.

You won’t find it in any of the ‘best pub’ guides that seem to appear every other week, but our local is the best pub simply because it’s, well, our local. And that is why our village has come together to save it from permanent closure. The White Horse Inn in Westleton – one of around a dozen pubs in Suffolk with that name – was put up for sale last year by the county’s foremost brewery, Adnams, as they looked to slim down their estate. It was hoped that, as with other pubs in the area, some enterprising new owners would come and take it over, tart it up and give it a new lease of life. But the longer it failed to sell, the more it seemed that it would end up, like so many others in Britain, falling into the hands of developers.

Match of the Day is back and, for the first time in a quarter of a century, without Gary Lineker. That’s the good news. Saturday night’s anchorman, Mark Chapman, is so much better than his smug, virtue-signalling predecessor. Perhaps it’s because he’s a professional broadcaster rather than an ex-player. This means he asks questions that fans want to hear answers to, rather than sharing some anecdote about when he was playing the game. However, not even this could save MotD’s return from being car crash TV. No matter how good Chapman is as a host, there remains a problem: Wayne Rooney. Now carrying even more timber than he did in his playing days, he sat rigidly in his seat like a man facing a firing squad.

Match of the Day is looking for a new presenter now that Gary Lineker is leaving after 25 years. The truth is, it really doesn’t matter who replaces him, whether they’re male or female, a former player or nepo baby like Roman Kemp. That’s because Match of the Day really doesn’t matter to a vast majority of football fans any more. There will be those who lament the fact that, as seems likely, MotD will get a female presenter. But does it really matter? The viewing figures, recently lauded by St Gary as ‘amazing’, are around the four million mark. This is out of a football-mad population of around 60 million people – excluding Scotland, which has its own highlights programme, Sportscene, on the BBC.

April is nesting season and with it comes egg collectors, an illegal band of very specialised and, in some ways, very British of criminals. Many would consider themselves wildlife enthusiasts. Most see their crime as a hobby, ignoring the effects of stealing a clutch of eggs and thus accelerating the species decline in a particular location. The thieves are certainly expert birders; they are able to recognise the nests of particular birds and know when to attempt their raids and where best to launch their raids. Older egg snatchers know not to exhibit their collections But though knowledgeable, they are despised across the birding community. The thieves themselves are not just ornithological anoraks.

For as long as anyone can remember, Tottenham Hotspur have offered half price season tickets for pensioners. No longer. This has been scrapped from the beginning of next season. Those already enjoying the 50 per cent concession in the vain hope they will live long enough to see the team win a trophy again will see their annual discount reduced, in phases, to 25 per cent. And only if they sit in certain allocated sections of the ground. For those of us approaching our golden years, we don’t even get that. The discount has been discontinued. Older fans are being pushed to one side by a club that seems hell bent on appealing to a younger market The price of a standard season ticket is going up too, by 6 per cent.

Late last year, Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon switched from cinema to living room on the Apple TV streaming service. An increasingly popular tactic, the move from big to small screen draws in a whole new audience, many of whom deliberately waited to see it for the price of a monthly subscription rather than spend a night at the pictures paying for overpriced popcorn, listening to other people’s conversations and not being able to check their Instagram account every five minutes. You would think watching anything for more than two hours requires some sort of marathon effort akin to sitting through The Ring Cycle Yet even as they relaxed on their sofas, they took to social media to complain: ‘Why are these films so long?

Football is becoming a testing ground for every madcap idea the supposed guardians of the sport can come up with. The latest is the blue card, a stopgap between the yellow and red cards for bookings and sendings off, designed to send players to a sin bin for ten minutes should they commit one of two offences: dissent or cynical fouls to prevent a goalscoring opportunity. It’s clearly designed to jazz up the game for a global television audience Sure, it works in rugby and ice hockey and something called roller derby where a brief period of numerical advantage can make a big difference. But as any football fan knows, this is less certain in the beautiful game.

On a cold January night 39 years ago in Los Angeles, 46 of the world’s biggest egos gathered together to record a song that was, according to Netflix ‘The Greatest Night In Pop.’ The song was the grandly titled ‘We Are The World’, a hastily composed follow up to the monumentally successful British charity single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’? Just seven weeks earlier. At least those appearing in the British version came across as less wholesome and more honest Band Aid’s effort was hardly a great song but the occasion captured the UK’s imagination and wallets so soon after pictures of starving Ethiopians had sent shockwaves across the nation. But ‘USA For Africa’, as the American supergroup called themselves, was seen as a poor follow-up.

Everyone has a guilty pleasure. Some have several. One of mine is David Cassidy who died six years ago from liver failure at the age of 67, an event that barely made more than a back-of-the-book page lead in many newspapers. Which is a shame. For at his peak, he had a fanbase on a par with Elvis and The Beatles, looks that sent young girls into delirium, a rich and textured voice that was tailor-made for the three-minute pop single and a charisma, not to mention a personal life, that in its prime gave showbiz reporters round the clock bylines.