It was not so much a bicycle, more an amalgam of bicycles, a frame from one, wheels from another, parts gathered from various places. Its improvised nature meant it was not as valued as much one that had arrived shiny and new. Once it was stolen, its absence prompting a telephone call to a local police station, where a pleasant officer asked for its description and then revealed that it has been handed in to them a week before; the thief had thrown it over a hedge at least two …
In the midst of the activity, as the story is told again, the memory again returns. A Good Friday without attending a church, without anything recognizably “religious,” a Good Friday where only the story existed.
Good Friday 1968 was a fine day. A friend of my mother’s came and took my sister and I for a walk – there were only two of us at the time, our younger sister would be born later that month.
We walked a long way for children of seven and three, along our road, …
After years of obscurity, the Somerset Levels have become a regular news feature. Whole villages cut off by rising waters, homes and farms being evacuated; the Farmers’ Guardian today carries news of a farm being looted. Searching for happier memories of my home area, I opened “Wetland”, Patrick Sutherland and Adam Nicolson’s 1986 book on life in the Somerset levels.
The Amazon website says of the book,
…Patrick Sutherland’s photographs and Adam Nicolson’s prose capture the existences of the men and women for whom this part of England forms the
The English architect sitting in the Dublin pub came from Somerset and not only did he come from Somerset, he knew the villages I called home and he knew Glastonbury.
Glastonbury was the centre of the world when I was a child; the stories with which we grew up made it the most important place in Britain. It was a place that resonated with hope of a different and a better world.
The Arthurian stories promised heroes who would again ride forth and right all wrongs. Layamon’s Brut from c.1200, …
Grandad died in March 1991, he would have been a hundred years old today. His soft words and gentle smile remain clear in the memory, together with his capacity for work and his enjoyment of silence
He was a farmer behind his times. He farmed in a prosperous part of the country, but he was happy in doing things in the way he had always done them. In the days before having to go to school, I remember sitting on the back of the old carthorse, Dinah, as she pulled …
Moments surface in the consciousness before sinking out of view. Going to Denner’s department store in Yeovil; eating Dundee cake at teatime on Christmas Day; dipping a hand into a vast tin of Quality Street, hoping not to get soft centres. Little by way of continuous narrative, except for the growing anticipation and excitement at primary school.
Christmas in school would never start until the last week of term, but it was observed in grand style. There was a Christmas dinner, prepared in our little school kitchen, and there would …
