England – Page 4 – For the fainthearted . . .

Blake’s England

An invitation came to attend the celebration on 28th November of the birth of the poet and painter William Blake. Were it not taking place in a distant city on another island, I should have liked to attend.

Blake was one of the poets we studied at A-Level. His collection Songs of Innocence and Experience seemed an accurate apprehension of his world as it was described to us in our history lessons.

However, it was Jerusalem that inspired someone whose college was within a lunchtime’s stroll of Glastonbury. England’s green …

The days of Dr Ingram

Have I told you about Dr Ingram before? I’m sure I have.

Dr Ingram our white-haired, cigarette smoking, bespectacled doctor, who always wore a suit and carried all that was necessary for his work in a Gladstone bag.

I can easily remember my National Health Service number from the days of Dr Ingram because I saw a lot of him. My card was printed with instructions on how to avail of the services, it is an artefact of times when the NHS was in its youth.

It was the autumn …

A razor is needed

Growing up in England of the 1960s meant growing up in a world of optimism and rapid scientific progress, it meant having a confidence in a modern world where research and technological advance would change not just the way we lived, but also the way we thought. The tenets of religion would be replaced by the tenets of science; ideas would be tested against empirical evidence, truths would only be accepted if they were evident to all.

Somewhere, the aspiration to a modern scientific world lost momentum, and old ways …

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 many of us knew. It was not hard to imagine lines spoken by Boycie being spoken by various people with whom we were familiar.

Boycie strives to give the appearance …

The August bank holiday

The M5 will be at a standstill tomorrow. It will be a Mrs Warboys day.

On Mrs Warboys days, the entire populations of large cities decide it is the very moment for the whole family to jump in the motor car and to head for seaside towns. The seaside towns of the south-west of England are there every other day of the year and are pleasant places for a walk even in the winter months, but only on Mrs Warboys weekends are they the focus of such massive invasions.

Mrs …

Keir could learn from Keir

A friend of my sister had been clearing out a house, there were books set aside to be discarded and my sister had saved two from the likely destiny of the recycling bin: a Bible and a biography of Keir Hardie, the pioneering figure of the British Labour Party. “I thought you might be interested,” my sister had said, leaving the books for me.

It had seemed an unlikely combination of books. I can recall only one colleague from my years in the church, a Dubliner, who might have had …