Too late for the jubilee
Albert Luxton was my mother’s maternal grandfather. He was a man who would have been delighted to have returned to England for the queen’s jubilee for he missed the opportunity in his own times. The Roll of Honour website gives brief details of a man who now only appears in family photographs: Served and returned. Born 1881, in Aller, Langport, … [continue reading …]
The Bleak Fifties
The Letters of John McGahern was received as a gift at Christmas. The days of January were dark enough without my reading adding to the gloom, I left the book until the long summer holidays. In the past, I would have doubted John McGahern. The doubt would not have been a questioning of the veracity of the accounts in his … [continue reading …]
Norman landings
It was the anniversary of the Normandy Landings today. When I was at school, the D-Day Landings were still the stuff of current affairs, one man who had been there lived at the other end of our row of council houses. He was a road man with the local district council, not a figure from history. Our history had much … [continue reading …]
Heathercombe Brake School Photographs
There are 679 (or thereabouts) photographs here. Some of them are duplicates and some of them are in random order. Paul Pope sent me a zip file in 2014 and I have been meaning to sort and upload them ever since. To have digitized these from prints to computer files must have taken many, many hours. They are nearly all … [continue reading …]
The old scams seem to work
There can be few people with email addresses who have not received at least an occasional email that seeks details that would allow the sender to defraud them. The “Spanish Hostage” scam is the oldest approach used (thus named because when it began two centuries ago people wrote letters claiming to be held hostage in Spain and promising abundant reward … [continue reading …]
The cycling nights have arrived
It was not so much a bicycle, more an amalgam of bicycles, a frame from one, wheels from another, parts gathered from various places. Its improvised nature meant it was not as valued as much one that had arrived shiny and new. Once it was stolen, its absence prompting a telephone call to a local police station, where a pleasant … [continue reading …]
A Sermon for Sunday, 26th June 2022
“Go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Luke 9:60 Four places in the Gospel reading help thinking about Jesus and to think about personal faith: Jerusalem, a Samaritan village, home, and the kingdom of God. Saint Luke Chapter 9 Verse 51 says, ‘When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to … [continue reading …]
The Tenth Anniversary of the Death of Minitel
It is ten years this week since the Minitel system in France was switched off. It had been revolutionary in the 1980s when it had begun. Visitors to France probably only encountered France’s forerunner of the Internet at hotel receptions, or in the pictures of busty women pasted on roadside hoardings inviting interested persons to encounter them via a 3615 … [continue reading …]
Familiar ballads
When did popular music become popular? There were folk songs that people knew that were passed down from generation to generation, and there were the music hall songs from the Nineteenth Century known and sung in urban and industrial communities up and down the country. But popular music, that which cuts across geography and class and even age, seems to … [continue reading …]
See Emily Play
The nurse changed the date. “Today is 1st May.” “Good morning, Emily. How are you this morning?” 1st May? Oh no, it would be so boring. Standing outside for hours and then a dinner where there would be very long speeches. All those old men and all those toasts. “Daddy, do I have to go today?” “Of course, we must … [continue reading …]