High Ham and Somerset – Page 10 – For the fainthearted . . .

The solstice is past

It has happened again this year. Despite the earnest wishes felt every year for more than 50 years, every year it happens. The days will start to get shorter tomorrow and, on Monday, Midsummer’s Day will be reached.

I have a vivid recollection of a lunchtime conversation at the primary school in High Ham, it must have been in 1969 or 1970.

“It’s drizzling,” I said to our lunchtime supervisor

“Who’s drizzling?” she asked

“The weather”, I said, “it’s drizzling”.

The lady sat looking out from the dinner room, watching …

Holes in the hedge

“Four o’clock in the morning, the cows in the field down the road started bellowing. Now I’m an age now when I like a bit of a lie-in; well, not get up at four o’clock anyway.

“I decided I had better go and find out what was wrong so put my overalls on over the top of my pyjamas and drove down the road. I got to the field where the cows were and there was a dolly bird in a cocktail dress standing in the middle of the field.…

My greatest achievement

I always walked oddly.

Archie, with whom I walked hundreds of miles (on one trek, a hundred and ten miles in five days), used to say that it was like walking with a duck. In the time I was covering the counties of Ulster with Archie, it was easy to laugh at such comments (walking from Co Donegal to Co Down on one occasion, it would have been hard if I had not enjoyed his company).

In days at primary school, being mocked for the way I walked was not …

Iris time

It is white. If it looks mauve, that’s because the picture was taken in the evening light. It is forty years old and looks as it does at the moment for only a brief time each May.

It is white, but it and its companions might have been any colour. They were gathered from the rubbish heap, rhizomes discarded because they had been muddled with others, either after they had been cut, or in the dispatch shed where the irises were packed before being sent off to addresses around the …

Vote Gerard Tucker – Independent

“All politics is local,” Tip O’Neill asserted. The former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives appreciated the power of local issues in determining voters’ decisions even in a country as vast as the United States.

Perhaps it is possible to go a step further and to assert that all politics is personal. Our voting decisions are shaped by our own personal history, our own personal interests, our own likes and dislikes. Even someone who votes in what they perceive to be an altruistic way does so because such …

Leaving nonsense unchallenged

A photograph of The Limekiln Inn appeared on Instagram. It’s a pub outside of the village of Long Sutton. In my younger days it was known as “the rock,” now it’s more a restaurant than a pub. Its skittle alley has been absorbed into the main building, providing more space for diners. Such is the way of the licensed trade in England, had The Limekiln not reinvented itself, it would have undoubtedly have gone the way of thousands of other pubs in England. It would have ceased to be …