Mister Duffy Changes Trains

  Watching the Detectives Since childhood, I have been a sucker for detective stories. I remember the excitement of the Sherlock Holmes stories when I first read them in an extended period of absence from primary school due to yet another bronchial illness. In my teens, I ran into Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, during a family holiday when, shall we say, relations were slightly strained between myself and my parents. These intricate puzzles were a welcome distraction from a rather difficult family atmosphere (all my fault, I hasten to add). In adulthood, I have enjoyed stories with a wide range of detective protagonists, including: ·        Father Brown, the wise little priest in GK Chesterton’s short stories; ·        Doctor Fell, John Dickson Carr’s creation, a mountainous, overweight caricature of Chesterton himself; ·        Barlach, the Swiss detective dying of an incu...

Lord Have Mercy This is a present which our neighbours from across the road gave me on the occasion of my first communion. I was aged seven, going on eight. I remember the day of this religious event, an important one for a Roman catholic. Somewhere I have a picture of myself, recently recovered from whooping cough, and all dressed up in a white shirt and white shorts, standing in front my dad’s Wolseley 15/60 looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth. The book itself is a missal, a prayerbook which includes the text of the mass, in both Latin and English. By that time, the Latin mass was already being phased out, but it was still occasionally said, and as a trainee altar boy I had to learn how to read and pronounce it, thankfully not to memorise it by heart. The Conways were a lovely family who lived across the road from us. Tom Conway had been a coal miner but had suffered a catastrophic accident down the pit, which had badly injured his back, and as a result he was now re...

  Neighbour, How Stands the Union? “ And they say that if you go to his grave and speak loud and clear, "Dan'l Webster—Dan'l Webster!" the ground 'll begin to shiver and the trees begin to shake. And after a while you'll hear a deep voice saying, "Neighbour, how stands the Union?" Then you better answer the Union stands as she stood, rock-bottomed and copper sheathed, one and indivisible, or he's liable to rear right out of the ground.” I have toyed with the idea of doing Desert Island Films for my blog one of these weeks, describing  my eight favourite films, and briefly articulating the reasons for my choice. However, that might be too ambitious.  For as long as I can remember, I have relished ghost stories and enjoyed them on the page and on both the big and small screens. So today, I will list some supernatural films which have particularly resonated with me. Here goes.  The Devil and Daniel Webster The quote above is from the first paragraph...

  The End of Days Over the last year or so, I have got used to various aspects of lockdown and working at home. After more than a year of working at home, no longer commuting the sixty miles each way to London, I have resolved that I will never go back to commuting five days a week. One rather uneasy thought has been occurring to me repeatedly recently, and that is if it is so easy to do my job at home rather than in the office, does anyone really need me to do it at all? Am I drawing a handsome salary on false pretences? Before I got used to it all, the 2020 lockdown culture got me down a bit, and sometimes it felt like The End of Days. The practicalities didn’t bother me. I was happy wearing a face covering, observing distance at the supermarket and cutting my own hair. I would go out in the garden with the kitchen scissors and hack lumps off my hair, which made me look ever so smart. I said to my older son Bill on one of our Facetime calls that the secret to cutting your o...

  The Best Years of Your Life When I was in my last year at school, there was a shortage of maths teachers. As a result, those few students taking the Certificate of Sixth Year Studies (something like a Scottish equivalent of the A-level) in mathematics had their classes from 4 until 5.30 after the other kids had gone home. My school was in Kirkcaldy, some 12-15 miles from my home in Cowdenbeath, and of course the school buses had all departed at ten past four. Do school buses still exist? So after my maths classes were over, I would walk the mile and a half from St Andrew’s School, on Overton Road, part of a respectable but rather faceless municipal estate, down through nondescript streets to the bus stance on the sea front, and get an ordinary public bus back to Cowdenbeath. The walk down to the sea was a welcome period of calm solitude at the end of the day, and afforded me a feeling that I was departing the world of childhood and school, which I still, probably unfairly, re...