‘Oh, I know all about goats,’ Sonia was saying. ‘People give them the same recommendation as the billeting officers did with evacuees – they’re no trouble. For all I know it may be true of goats. But then, like evacuees, they smell, and that’s quite enough for me.’ – Hemlock and After, 1952, Angus Wilson … Read more
A short drive to the Catskills and a Saturday stroll along the Ashokan Reservoir Promenade. Wildflowers growing in the cracks of the dam. The reservoir provides 40% of New York City’s water. Access is prohibited. It’s a steep drop on the other side. We didn’t see any bald eagles but we did see a cormorant … Read more
They say the day you get a boat is the happiest day of your life. That is, until the day you sell the boat. The friend who shared those words had just bought a small sailboat. I think she may have actually sailed it a handful of times, the rest of the time it sat … Read more
“What are you doing in the wardrobe?” “Narnia business” C.S.”Jack” Lewis spent childhood years in a house in Belfast where he and his brother immersed themselves in myths and legends. They spent wet afternoons sitting inside an old and cavernous wardrobe where they told each other tales of a magical kingdom of talking animals. The … Read more
All our stories begin before we are born. Not Just the blue eyes or flat feet we inherit, but the stories we hear from uncles and aunts, from grandmothers and grandfathers. Even if oral history is no more reliable than the party game of Chinese whispers, everyone bringing to it their own subjective lumber of … Read more
Took a stroll around the perimeter and something colorful caught my eye. There – discretely propped against a generator close to the community garden – was this little gem. A slate grey chip – about four inches across painted with flowers. Someone went to the trouble of making this and planting it in the wild. … Read more
It’s always fun when a tiresome book about the rules of the English language gets debunked and when some clever clogs points out that the prose of said tiresome tome is full of the very errors it decries. So it was with Lynn Truss’s bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation … Read more
I was first drawn to Anna Kavan’s writing through her collection of wartime stories I Am Lazarus (1945) – the perfect antidote to the mindless cheerfulness of Blitz nostalgia. Kavan – the pacifist and anti-fascist – is having none of that delusion. But that’s another story. Twenty years later – in a time of Cold … Read more
My father did not bring much back from his six years of war. He would have had his demob suit of course, and I remember a leather jerkin that he wore into the 1960s. Then, in common with millions of other military personnel and civilians, there was the case of what we now call PTSD. … Read more
“I am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace, I like to paint simple things that are a little strange.” – Gertrude Abercrombie After Pied Piper and The Thinking, my explorations led me into the byways of British literature of WW2 evacuation and evacuees. On that journey, I made – and continue to … Read more
This post is in answer to the question “Operation Pied Piper: What were they thinking?” At least in terms of the evacuation scheme. The choice of code-name remains ambiguous. It begins with a little history. Napoleon In the first years of the 19th century, Napoleon made no secret of his intention to invade Britain, … Read more
Many people know that the poet T. S. Eliot was very fond of cats and indeed created some wonderful cat characters and wrote poems about them. Many people also know that he loved practical jokes – things like exploding cigars and farting cushions. They may also know that he was a fan of detective fiction … Read more
Optimized for full cable reception, BlueTooth and wi-fi. The Hat on the Cat – Inspired by all the Amazing Hats at The Three Muses.
OuLiPo meets Anapestic Tetrameter and the mad, bad and dangerous to know Bored Lyeron (If you feel you must read Lord Byron, or if you are unfamiliar with The Destruction of Sennacherib go here.) The Seduction of Sir Knack-a-Rib The Shakespearian came down like the gulf on the wold, And his so-shorts were gleaming like … Read more
Daffodil: good fortune; pleasure; contentment; joy. – from the surrealist dictionary definition generator. Windy today so lots of daffodils nodding and bobbing about in the cheese. Here’s something from the Oulipo Compendium that’s not quite Wordsworth: The Imbeciles I wandered lonely as a crowd That floats on high o’er valves and ills When all at … Read more