Almost ghostlike
“Do you believe in ghosts, sir?” asked a student. “No,” I said, “Einstein’s theories say they can’t exist.” “Who is Einstein, sir?” “A man who said past, present and future happen all at once.” “I believe in ghosts. sir, and the paranormal.” I might have told the class the sill story of the night I almost believed in ghosts. One … [continue reading …]
Where do the DUP go?
To be a unionist politician in Northern Ireland in 2021 is to face the question posed in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?” The demographic trends are inexorable. In the 2011 Census, Protestants were 48% of the population and … [continue reading …]
Saint George and Shakespeare
Saint George’s Day coincides with the anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. The Bard enjoys invoking the name of the patron saint of England. “Cry God for England, Harry and Saint George!” he wrote in Henry V. Of course, God must have been on the side of the English, didn’t they win? One wonders how seriously William Shakespeare took … [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 Sapin and promising abundant reward … [continue reading …]
Tearaways and trespassers
It would only be with hesitancy that I would point a finger at any youth. Were we regarded as hooligans and tearaways when we were young? Maybe we were not as bad as that, or maybe we were worse. Maybe, there were even expletives shouted at us if we had been especially annoying. Apart from the bicycles on which we … [continue reading …]
A local hymn for Somerset Day
As the county holds its annual celebration of all that is good about Somerset, it seems worthwhile to remember a hymn written in one of Somerset’s parishes, Rock of Ages. The hymn was written by Augustus Toplady, a man whose life encompassed the best, and aspects of the worst, of 18th Century Christianity. He was a man with a profound … [continue reading …]
Critical thought
In a lesson surveying the roots of anti-Semitism, we watched an Imperial War Museum video which noted that the superstitions and myths about Jews which had been believed through the centuries included them being blamed for the Black Death in the Fourteenth Century. In 1347, the Black Death was a bubonic plague that swept through Europe. Estimates of how many … [continue reading …]
Les McKeown made us smile
It was 1981 and there had been a school reunion a couple of weeks previously. A few dozen of us had travelled down to Devon to attend a lunch and to tell stories that would have been boring to anyone who had not been at school with us. In the spirit of the occasion, some of us had travelled by … [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 …]