October 2017 – For the fainthearted . . .

Samhain and time

The dark evening have come. The Celtic month of Samhain has been reached; the month of the dead in which the days grow ever shorter. It is not hard to see how those in former times dreaded the dark months, those times when even the daylight is not much more than a grey gloominess.

A friend once complained that winters here were so much darker than in Ontario, her home for decades. It was a baffling comment, the latitudes are not so different. “How so?” I asked. “The daylight hours …

Animated reality

The theme music of Scooby-Doo! is audible. At ten minutes past seven on a Monday evening, it seems an odd sound, but such is the multiplicity of television channels and the repetition of scheduling, that it should not seem such a surprise to hear traces of the canine detective.

Scooby-Doo! was a favourite programme in times past, though given the paucity of choice, that might not be a great accolade. Any cartoon was watched with avid enthusiasm, they were not plentiful. Tom and Jerry and The Flintstones along with The …

Simple enjoyment

A motor accident had caused the brain injury; always a quiet and a gentle man, he had assumed a childlike innocence. If he wasn’t to be found in the house, his wife knew where he would be found; sitting on a bench at the shoreline in the tiny seaside village. Not for him the vast seascapes or the glories of a sunrise over the Irish Sea, but rather a fascination with the waves, he was intrigued with the shape and the movement of every single wave as it broke upon …

Enumerated

My National Health Service number was not hard to remember “POVJ 46.” To be honest, even in the 1970s it seemed rather too brief. If one used every possible four letter sequence combination of the letters of the alphabet, twenty-six times twenty-six times twenty-six times twenty-six, one reached a total of 456,976 permutations between AAAA and ZZZZ. Then if one multiplied that by one hundred, the number of possible two digit numbers between 00 and 99, one came to a total of 45,697,600. To provide an NHS number for that …

Remembered alive

Treasured Island, Frank Barrett’s excellent literary tour of Britain has many Michael Caine moments, those moments when it is tempting to say aloud, “not a lot of people know that.” One such moment comes with a visit to Cotchford Farm, the one time home of AA Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh. Barrett tells how the house was later owned by Brian Jones, the founder of the Rolling Stones, who was found dead in a swimming pool at the house in 1969.

Brian Jones is remembered as a member …

The power of a song

My father often recalls a poem learned in childhood days. It had a sinister, threatening tone, and haunted him as a boy. For as long as I can remember, he has expressed the wish that it had not been taught to him. The poem arose again in conversation, and, unlike the days of decades ago, when its source would have been difficult to identify, typing a few words into Google brought up the lines so often recited:

The poem “Antigonish” was written by William Hughes Mearns, an American writer, in …