Mister Duffy Changes Trains

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...

Echoes A Good New Year to one and all. One month a few years ago, our book group discussed The Good Earth , by Pearl S. Buck. The book tells the story of Wang-Lung and his wife O-Lan in Anhui province, China. Partly due to hard work, and partly to turns of fate, Wang-Lung progresses from struggling peasant to wealthy landowner. Pearl S. Buck grew up in China in the early 20 th century, the daughter of American Christian missionaries there. As I read the book, a couple of echoes, faint and obscure, came to mind, but first I should confess to snobbery. After the first fifty or so pages, I abandoned my attempt to read the book. It felt to me like Catherine Cookson goes to China. A couple of days later, by complete coincidence, the author was mentioned on the radio as a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. I therefore felt duty bound to return to the book. I did finish it and in doing so, encountered two episodes of déjà vu. And don’t tell me I can say that again, I’ve heard that ...

  What Sends Shivers Down Your Spine? I don’t mean literally, what makes you shiver? I use the expression ‘that sends shivers down my spine’ quite frequently, but I am usually referring to a work of art, a snatch of poetry or prose or music, that speaks almost painfully directly to me. It is as if it is reaching down inside me, touching something vital which responds with the speed of a snake striking its prey. You will all have your own examples, what moves one person may leave another cold, but anyway, here are some of mine. Strangely, although I am not a believer, two of the prime examples are of a religious nature. I have already mentioned in a previous blog how in a television production of Arnold Wesker’s play, Chips with Everything , an aircraftman recites the Lyke-Wake Dirge, as I recall in a Scottish accent, and with none of the stylised Yorkshire-speak: This aye night, this aye night. Every night and all. Fire and fleet and candlelight, And Christ receive thy ...

  Last Things I am being encouraged by the administration of my former workplace (in case you missed it, I retired in February) to clear what was my office by the end of this month. I have been ruthlessly binning material and sending reams of paper to recycling. On the one hand, decluttering can be satisfying, but on the other, there is always the fear that something important may be discarded. And of course, there is the more general feeling of attachment to some items of no practical use. Also, in exercises of this nature, you are always astonished at the amount of… stuff that you accumulate in this life. We recently had the entire interior of the house decorated and during the process took several hundredweight of stuff to charity shops. Once the redecoration was over, however, we were surprised to find that we still didn’t have room for what was left. I am taking home a few things from the office. One is a book which I rescued from a skip outside the library of the Clinical...

Talkin’ ‘bout my Generation This time last year, the subject of my blog was Halloween. What is particularly scary (even scarier than the pictured Halloween house round the corner) is that it feels more like a fortnight ago than a year ago. At age 68, I realise the truth of the cliché that as you get older, time seems to accelerate to terrifying speeds. Last week, I got my COVID and flu jabs. The week before last, I had a colonoscopy, and this illustrates another aspect of getting old. You, your family and friends all seem to be either developing ‘orrible diseases or having investigations for suspected ODs. The other thing I have noticed is that so many of these interesting ailments characteristic of later life seem to involve lavvy problems and/or require thorough scrutiny of one’s intimate portions. So far, I have been one of the lucky ones, in that the colonoscopy didn’t find anything ‘orrible. I wouldn’t recommend it as a fun afternoon out, but the experience wasn’t particularly ard...

  Rescued writing Although there were plenty of books lying about our house when I was a child, relatively few were left when my mum died, a dozen or so years after dad. Mum had macular degeneration in the last few years of her life so that reading was pretty much out of the question. I do, however, have a handful of books rescued from the family home. You can see two of them above, fruit of my dad’s membership of the Companion Book Club. I think I have mentioned this before. You got a recently published hardback book every month for about six bob rather than the pound or two that a newly published book would cost at the time (this was in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s). As I recall, we had several shelves of these books, with uniform cover styles, but most of them were disposed of during my mum’s declining years. On the front inner flap of the Helen MacInnes book, it says “5/9d to Companion Book Club members only. Originally published by Collins at 21/-.” This would translat...