Mister Duffy Changes Trains

  I want to be there when The Band starts playing ‘Oh the moon shines bright tonight along the Wabash. From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay. Through the sycamores the candle light is gleaming On the banks of the Wabash far away.’ Paul Dresser, ‘On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away’   A few years ago I saw a reader poll in The Guardian. Readers were asked to vote for their favourite popular music LP, but with the proviso that the usual suspects were disqualified in advance. You weren’t allowed to vote for Sergeant Pepper, Dark Side of the Moon, Rumours , or other albums which had sold in terrifyingly large numbers. From my own point of view, the exclusion of certain albums which almost everyone had in their collection was irrelevant on two counts. In the first place, I never get round to voting in these polls or generally participating in anything. I’m like the chap in the joke who is continually praying for a win on the lottery, until the Good Lord in a fit of...

  A Day in the Life It’s Thursday night already and we have only just finished Tuesday’s crossword. When am I ever supposed to get anything done? Following the rain a couple of weeks ago and the recent hot weather, the garden has exploded into greenery. I used to have an Australian colleague who said that he particularly liked the seasonal extremities here, and specifically how after some warm and wet weather in May and June, everything burst into copious leaf in the space of a few days. That’s all very well, all very fine and large, I’m sure, but it takes no account of the calls on my time. The lawn has suddenly become knee-height. I should have cut it last weekend, but we had to go to visit Margaret and Andrew in Yorkshire and have a great time drinking lots of beer and eating curry. Look, somebody has to do it. And I was busy the last few days when the weather was magnificent, so that now the grass is even longer but the rain has come down, so I can’t mow it just yet. Bush...

                                            Travellers’ Tales 2: Another one Drives the Bus In the last couple of years of the last century and the first couple of years of this, when the kids were still of primary school age, we went on a few camping holidays in France. We would take the car over on a ferry and bring it back with the kids’ feet up on cases of wine and boxes of French cheese. Before I tell you what these holidays were like, let me tell you what they were NOT like. They were not like the camping holidays I had occasionally as a young fellow in Scotland, throwing up the tent in pouring rain, on a hillside with rocky soil which bent the metal pegs as you hammered them in with a half-brick found among the other rubbish which littered the site. Staying in a threadbare, khaki-coloured tent in which one might imagine, to quote the late Victoria ...

  Horler, They Say, For Excitement Some twenty-odd years ago, in a Hospital League of Friends shop, I bought a second-hand book, simply because of the legend on the spine, ‘ Fillets on the Menu , by John Hague (pseudonym of a famous author)’. I found both the title and the authorship intriguing. It was the first and possibly only edition, published in the 1930’s. After assiduous internet searching, I have finally found the identity of John Hague. The name, and in parts the style, suggest Ian Hay, but the introductory notes hint strongly that the author is a woman. In fact, the author was Ursula Bloom. The book itself is a portmanteau of stories of the various residents in a genteel boarding house in the 1930’s, and there is a hint at the beginning that it was written for a bet between Bloom and her husband, who considered their fellow-guests too dull to be the subject of a novel. The stories are told in a rather lightweight style (hence my original suspicion of Ian Hay), but co...