RattleBag and Rhubarb

Gratitude and Toxic Positivity

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I wrote this bit of a rant in late 2018. It’s time for it to have a public airing. And then time for a pandemic era update.  “Have a nice day” Perhaps the most reasonable and polite response is: “Thanks but I have other plans.” The positive psychology industry acquired a loud new division in … Read more

A Cabinet of Curiosities

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Raw, cold, and damp but it’s still good to get out. Thanks to the ongoing lurgy there are no social gatherings, visits, or events to distract us from what is on the doorstep. Like stickybeaking tourists clogging up the sidewalks of a foreign city, we’ve been out and about spotting the everyday marvels and quotidian … Read more

The Sun Like a Force-Ripe Orange

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The sun shining … just there in the sky like a force-ripe orange That striking image is from Samuel Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners. Henry Oliver, who earns the nickname Sir Galahad for his bravado, has just arrived from Trinidad. Here he is on that first morning in the big city – in Westbourne Grove … Read more

Eye-Rhyme Blues

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eye rhyme /ˈī ˌrīm/ noun An eye rhyme, also called a visual rhyme or a sight rhyme, is a rhyme in which two words are spelled similarly but pronounced differently. A similarity between words in spelling but not in pronunciation, e.g., love and move. This piece of complete silliness started with the Robert Louis Stevenson … Read more

Simple Pleasures and Stickybeaking

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Stickybeak  NOUN: an intrusive, meddlesome, busybody, nosy parker who sticks their nose (beak) into other people’s business. The act of stickybeaking. VERB: to snoop or pry into other’s people’s business. This was a delightful new word for me this week although it’s clearly common currency in Australia and New Zealand. I came across it first … Read more

October , Propaganda, and Mrs. Miniver Buys the Chrysanthemums Herself

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The Year Begins in October  Armistead Maupin based his vignettes of gay life in 1970s San Francisco – Tales of the City – on Jan Struther’s Mrs. Miniver (1939). They first appeared in a long-running serial in the San Francisco Chronicle. Instinctively I wanted to write a gay male Mrs Miniver, the minutiae of gay … Read more

Wilt and the #1976Club

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Together with a whole lot of other readers in the UK in 1976, I read Wilt – the first in a series of over-the-top, grotesque Tom Sharpe novels about the misadventures of a mild-mannered and hapless tech college teacher named Henry Wilt. He’s a rather fuddy-duddy, decent-enough, beer-drinking, everyman kind of chap given to being … Read more

Attention at Poughkeepsie

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“Attention at Poughkeepsie” is how announcements begin over the sound system at Poughkeepsie station. Trains and stations have nothing at all to do with this post although Poughkeepsie has an extremely nice station – built into a rockface and designed by the same people who gave us New York’s Grand Central. No, this post has … Read more

All for Nothing

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Hands down, this is the best book I’ve read all year: All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski.  It’s the bitter winter of 1945. An odd assortment of people lives in the Georgenhof – a small neglected estate in East Prussia. Eberhard von Globig is a Sonderführer, a special officer in the German army away in … Read more

Four Little Girls

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Carole Robertson (14), Carol Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14) died on September 15, 1963, when a bomb exploded during Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The bombing came just days after the federal ruling came for Alabama to integrate the school system. Four … Read more

Back-to-School: First Grade

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First Grade by Ron Kortgee Until then, every forest had wolves in it, we thought it would be fun to wear snowshoes all the time, and we could talk to water. So who is this woman with the gray breath calling out names and pointing to the little desks we will occupy for the rest … Read more