My mother was asking for a copy of Wind in the Willows to read and of all the books written for children in the twentieth century (it was published around 1908) it is one of the few that speaks to adults as much if not more than young children. Not just because Kenneth Grahame used…
Category: Quotidial
Achieving One’s Goals
I am sure from sometime during school onwards we have all set ourselves goals to achieve. I also recall from my years fund raising how the first thing we used to write was the ‘aims and objectives’ of the project, goals not there for the individual, but for the group. And in a way individual…
Chilled Spring
This past week Snowdrops (Galanthus) started to appear in the garden amidst the hard frosts and very cold days. They are the first flowers of spring and are often seen coming up through snow. The Dogwood (Cornus) and Honeysuckle (Lonicera) are giving the tiniest leaves. On my walks there is one long bank that every…
Cries In The Dark
Some days when my mother’s illness surprises even me and she screams and talks and calls out for twenty hours at a stretch I wonder about the fragility of the human mind, a collection of impulses and chemicals modern science is only just getting to grips with and about which it still lacks a good…
Once More With Passion
I remember reading all my Shakespeare at school and being taken to Stratford to see two plays and watching videos of various productions and being struck by the whole ‘ethos’ that has arisen around the plays. Every generation must realise them anew, and some new productions are startlingly good though most are drab and uninventive…
Men’s Fashion
So today I bought online pair of jeans for the princely sum of £120. probably the most expensive trousers I have ever bought but I plead the rip I didn’t know about in my old trousers, which I have been walking around in for a few days. Wearing the same clothes for three days in…
Where Stories Come From
For generations there was a strongly held belief in the Music of the Spheres. In Hindu beliefs there are states of mind when one can actually hear the music, but in the original Pythagorean concept there was an order to the planets that was mystical. There is an allied belief in Judaism about the states…
Too Much
I remember when I was around eleven years old I used to come in from school and put on the TV and watch the young children’s programmes, then mine, and not get up until the news came on. I was a year away from exams and I came home one day and the TV had…
Queenie-Colleen
During my mother’s illness she was constantly asking for a puppy she could look after and hold whilst she was bed bound and she particularly wanted a rough collie, because one of the first dogs she ever knew had been a rough collie called Scottie. The first one we found we lost because I couldn’t…
Laugh For Twenty-Five Minutes
I remember when mum was homeless for six months and she took a chalet over the winter to live in. She had an old black and white TV on which every week she watched a British sitcom called It Aint Half Hot Mum. There were times when it was very funny. This was years after…