Mister Duffy Changes Trains

                                                      Me outside the house where we lived in New Site Street, Sliema Sentimental Journey One of the first pieces I wrote in this blog series mentioned my time in Malta as a pre-school kid, and the dysfunctional relationship I had with the nuns who ran the nursery school which I attended. See ‘Christopher Plummer and the Nuns’, February 6 th , 2021. I didn’t give the full story at the time. It will follow in a minute, but first, let’s return to the present day. You will be aware, from my droning on and on about it, that I was treated for prostate cancer this year. Treatment seems to have been successful, and in general I have got off a bloody sight more lightly than do most cancer patients. Once the side-effects of treatment had abated for the most part, Linda and I dec...

                                                                  On the way from Dobbiaco to Cortina Serendipity Have you ever started cooking some particularly fancy dish using a recipe from a book, and found that you were missing some ingredients? As a result, you had to improvise, making substitutions for the unavailable constituents? And have you noticed that sometimes, the improvised version actually tastes better than if you had used the exact formula given in the recipe? This has happened to me a couple of times, and it is rather gratifying to find myself able to improve on the book. Right now, however, I’d like to tell you about a different and perhaps more significant serendipitous event in our lives (mine and Linda’s). In June 2015, we celebrated our silver wedding anniversary b...

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...