Mister Duffy Changes Trains

Lucky Bag Apologies, this month you are getting a very mixed bag of trivial and introspective stuff. I feel it’s a bit irresponsible of me, when the world is going to hell in a handbasket: Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and so on. However, I don’t really know how to write the serious material, even if I wanted to. But I just want to say that I am as appalled as anyone else at the horrors going on in the world. Words that you always have to look up Are you like me, there are some words whose meaning you have to look up every time you encounter them? You meet this word in a book or article you’re reading, you look it up and think, ‘Oh, that’s what it means. Now I know.’ Then a couple of months later, you come across it again, and you’ve already forgotten the meaning. Orwell made this point not about meaning but about spelling: he observed that he could never spell the formal name for a snapdragon, antirrhinum, without looking it up in a dictionary. My brother John once told me of an art crit...

Linda beside Loch Linnhe in 2019, when we climbed Ben Nevis, in an image reminiscent of Local Hero Music in Cars A couple of weeks ago, I was watching something on television, I can’t remember what, and at one point, the background music was a heartland rock number which sounded extremely familiar. Where had I heard it before? I didn’t focus my mind on this question, as that is futile, I just came back to it every so often and eventually I remembered. In 1982, Mike Dixon and I were presenting some results from our trial of intraincisional antibiotics in biliary tract surgery at a conference at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Mike had his car with him as he was staying for the full three days of the conference. I had come up on the train from Sutton where I was living at the time (see last month’s blog). At the end of the session, Mike drove me to Norwich station for my train back, and he was playing a cassette on the car stereo which included this number. After a little inter...

                                                        Freiburg Not All Ghosts are of Dead People Have you ever heard footsteps on the stairs in a house in which you thought you were alone? It is a very unnerving experience. Whenever it has happened to me, I have been in a terraced or semi-detached house, so there was always the possibility that the sound came from next door. The New Jersey thriller writer Harlan Coben tells how at a get-together of writers of page-turners, the question arose: what is the scariest noise in the world? Is it a man being tortured? Is it a woman screaming? Is it a baby crying? Then someone said, ‘No. The scariest noise in the world is: you’re all alone in a cabin in the woods; you know you’re all alone; no one else is out in the woods; you’re downstairs alone, and from upstairs you hear the t...

  Two Albums and Absent Friends This month, I want to talk to you about two LPs, one of which I think was a high point of its epoch. The second was probably less influential but it means a lot to me because it loomed large in a specific period in my life. The first record I want to drone on about is Sheet Music , released in 1974 by 10cc. The albums that people remember from that time tend to be the blockbusters, like Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon , Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road , and Band on the Run , by Wings. However, around that time, when I was a first year student, these didn’t do much for me. On the other hand, Feats Don’t Fail Me Now , by Little Feat, and Sheet Music knocked my socks off. I might bang on about the Little Feat album another time, but for now, let’s get back to 10cc. The track from Sheet Music that everyone remembers is the big hit single, Wall Street Shuffle . It is a brilliant single, but the album cont...

  Old Fogeys After last month’s blog, I received a query: who or what was Big White Carstairs? Well, Big White Carstairs was a character invented by JB Morton for his humorous column in the Daily Express, under the pen-name Beachcomber. Carstairs was a British Empire stuffed shirt, obsessed with formalities and proprieties, who had perennial problems with his dress trousers, making attendance at dinner difficult in whatever corner of Africa or Asia provided his current posting. There was a lengthy thread of stories about him, titled ‘Trousers Over Africa’. Morton had served in the trenches in the first world war. Back in civvy street, he wrote the column, By the Way , by Beachcomber, from the 1920s to the 1970’s, for which he ought to have got a medal anyway, regardless of his wartime service. He was one of several conservative, indeed fogeyish, newspaper funny men of the mid-twentieth century. Despite active service in the British Army and subsequently in military intelligence...

Real Life Can’t Compete                              In  Atlanta Botanic Gardens, when we visited our dear friends Bob and Irina last year Before I get started, here are two popular music quiz questions. Don’t Google them, the answers will appear at the bottom of this piece. 1.        By what name is Ellen Naomi Cohen better known? 2.        Which Neil Young song provided a hit for the Dave Clark Five? **************************** Morag Styles, a much-loved friend and neighbour, died just after Christmas. She was a lovely person and a terrific character, first ever Professor of Children’s Poetry at Cambridge. She was a stalwart of our street’s book group and provided impressive hospitality on the occasions when she hosted it. I always went home plastered on those nights. Here is her obituary in The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.c...