Why should I always have to say sorry?
Walking from the school at the lunch break, a boy took a handful of shiny conkers from his pocket. The sight evoked feelings of guilt. It must be some fifty-five years ago, for any later and we would have been living in High Ham. My father had taken me to a roadside a mile or so from our house, outside … [continue reading …]
Unrewarded loyalty
It is the 109th anniversary of the signing of the Ulster Covenant. On this day in 1912, half a million Unionist and Loyalist people signed a declaration that they would not have Home Rule in Ireland. In retrospect, it is hard to know how well such loyalty has served working class Protestant people. The lot of Loyalists seems to steadily … [continue reading …]
Thanks a million, Boycie
Without Boycie, Del Boy would not have been the character he became. It is the rivalry, the sparring, the oneupmanship, and the strange affection between the characters played by John Challis and David Jason, that gave Only Fools and Horses many of its most humorous moments. Boycie is so funny because he is an amalgam of the sort of characters … [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 …]
Bridgwater Fair
It is billed by this week’s Bridgwater Mercury as the biggest travelling funfair in the south-west. In a town known for its spectacular Guy Fawkes’ Carnival, it is not hard to imagine that the annual fair at Saint Matthew’s Field is also a large scale operation. The Showman’s Guild who run the fair have said it will be “Covid safe.” … [continue reading …]
A Sermon for Sunday, 26th September 2021
“So they hanged Haman on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai” Esther 7:10 It is some fifteen years since I read Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. It is a book of both extraordinary beauty and hideous ugliness. Set in Afghanistan against the background of the rise to power of the appalling Taliban regime in the 1990s, it pulls no … [continue reading …]
Phantom services
There seemed to be always a tinge of excitement about things that were ghostly, spectral, phantom-like. An air of mystery surrounded phenomena that suggested rational explanation might not be readily available. A BBC Radio piece on “ghost trains” in 2015 was the sort of item that caught the imagination. These were not fairground rides but infrequent services with empty carriages … [continue reading …]
Not talking to girls
Standing outside at breaktime, I became aware that a circle of boys had formed. They wanted to know what I thought about the Champions League results on Wednesday, whether I was going to the Saint Patrick’s Athletic match that evening, and whether I had a ticket for the match against Shamrock Rovers match this coming Friday (the answers to the … [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 …]