Nitrous oxide and four crowns
‘Now, I would advise you to go home and to sleep for as long as possible. Take some paracetamol and try to go to sleep, it will be the best way to deal with the pain.’ Feeling that I had been punched repeatedly in both sides of the face, I went to the reception. The smiling young woman looked up. … [continue reading …]
We have wintered it out
After his poetry collection Wintering Out was published in 1972, a comment from Seamus Heaney on that violent and turbulent year was reported in the Cork Examiner, “If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere.” Some forty-eight years later, as Covid-19 closed down society, Heaney’s words became the most popular meme in Ireland. The words have expressed the … [continue reading …]
A statuesque lady
The unveiling of her statue in Grantham at the weekend has shown that even in death, Margaret Thatcher retains her capacity to polarise opinion. Never someone to whom people could be indifferent, Britain’s first female premier was either loved or hated. Margaret Thatcher was a revolutionary. Her revolution was not amongst the middle classes; any Tory leader might have commanded … [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 …]
Yes, I do like to see people suffer!
Arranging the CDs in the rack, I picked up an Adele’s 21. In the the final track on the album, Someone Like You, her soulful voice expresses the angst of the jumbled emotions of the lyrics. Never mind, I’ll find someone like you I wish nothing but the best for you. ‘Hmmm, Adele’, I thought, ‘you’re a better person than … [continue reading …]
The old hatred
This morning, I lent my copy of David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count to a colleague. It is a brilliant piece of polemic against the antisemitism of supposedly progressive groups (antisemitism from elsewhere has tended to be a given). Once, in school, we tried to understand this strangest of prejudices. ‘Mr Poulton, why did people hate the Jews?’ We had been … [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 …]