Mister Duffy Changes Trains

  God Bless Us, Every One We are departing from tradition on two fronts this Christmas. First, the Harvey Goodwin Avenue book group usually does not discuss a book at its December meeting, which is usually just a celebratory get-together. This year, however, we have made an exception and will be discussing A Christmas Carol , by Charles Dickens (in case you thought it might be another Christmas Carol written by someone else). This marks no change of routine for me, as I read it every December in any case. The picture shows the inside cover of my copy. As you can see, I got it for Christmas in 1965, aged nine. I had specifically requested it, as the previous Christmas Eve, the cartoon Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol had been on television, and I had been much intrigued by it. As I recall, it followed the story reasonably faithfully. When I got the book, I did find it rather an adult portion, as Levon Helm described New York in the late 1950’s. It took me some time to get used to ...

                                                                                       Amalfi at dawn Thursday’s Child Well, two things have happened. One, in the last few weeks, someone has got up and offered me their seat on the tube at least twice. Two, I have bitten the bullet and travelled abroad for the first time since the pandemic struck.                                                           ***************************** More of the o...

Little Worlds Have you read a book called The Sittaford Mystery , by Agatha Christie? It’s a standalone novel, not one of the Poirot or Marple series. It is a murder mystery, the plot is an intriguing one, and the solution to the mystery, while banal, makes perfect sense. But its real attraction is the setting. It is midwinter in a little settlement of half a dozen or so houses on Dartmoor, the snow is coming and the place will soon be completely isolated. A gathering of neighbours messing about with a Ouija board receive a message that a friend in Exhampton, the nearest town, is dead. There are no telephones in Sittaford, and Major Burnaby decides to brave the oncoming snow to walk the six miles over moorland to check up on his friend. The book isn’t Aggie’s best, but the first few pages, introducing this little world of Sittaford, up on the moor and separated by the weather from civilisation, are very intriguing. The reader is hooked in minutes. I have pretensions to being well read,...

                                                   Dunfermline City Chambers, an iconic Fife view Me and the Queen We all knew that the Queen was very old and that she had to die sometime soon. However, she had gone on so long that we tended to think of her as permanent, so that for many people, myself included, her death came as something of a surprise. Between around 2005 and 2017, I wrote a series of stories featuring a small boy called Bill, growing up in Fife in the 1960’s and 1970’s. They related fictionalised events in my own childhood, and were written for the benefit of my children, Bill and Tom. I suspect Bill and Tom didn’t find them particularly interesting, but they were fun to write, and my great friend Kevin Connelly printed and bound them very attractively so that I could give Bill and Tom respectable hard copies r...

                             Central Park Written on the Subway Wall I’ve never been a particular fan of Simon and Garfunkel, but I have always had a terrific respect for them, in the same way as you don’t want to read Vanity Fair or Pendennis every week, but Thackeray was a brilliant novelist all the same. Art Garfunkel has the most amazing singing voice and Paul Simon is an immensely skilled and inspired songwriter. When seeking musical solace or entertainment, I don’t necessarily seek them out, but when I do hear something by them, I like it. Perhaps their most famous work is the album Bridge Over Troubled Water , and I have the same objection to that as I have mentioned for other iconic musical works. I just heard it played over and over again until I was heartily sick of it. As a young teenager, I remember visiting my cousin in Linwood in the west of Scotland and having to spend hours in his bedroom li...

  Not King’s College Chapel The picture above is of a ruined 1960’s building, standing alone out west of Cambridge, in an area which is gradually being built up. I pass it on the way out to the Parkrun on Saturday morning. I think it was at one time a university laboratory, and it now looks like the sort of place where in days gone by, boffins bred monkeys with three heads and whatnot. Anyway, the point is that Cambridge is not all dreaming spires (yes, I know, that’s Oxford) and classical architecture, and I thought I would show a couple of Cambridge buildings that are less well known and that stimulate some memories for me.   This is the back of Frank Young House, which as I understand it contains student residences for Darwin College. I like it because it looks like the superstructure at the stern of an ocean liner, or at least it does so to me. There are so many things evoked by ships or the sea. Around fifteen years ago, I had agreed to teach a workshop to French Ph...

  Traveller's Tales 3- An Old Asia Hand From October 1981 to September 1982, I lived in Sutton, Surrey, right on the edge of Banstead Common, where the southern end of the great metropolis of London finally yields to countryside. I was working in the South Thames Cancer Registry on the Sutton site of the Royal Marsden Hospital. It was not a very happy year for me. I was supposedly a scientist but was employed on NHS administrator pay and conditions, and I got precious little science done. I had come from Edinburgh Medical School where the research facilities were amazing, to a satellite of a hospital with a library about the size of your spare bedroom. I was a young chap with no girlfriend and not a lot of common sense. I shared a house with three other people. The others were continually moving out and being replaced, and one chap who was there for three months was a radiologist from what was then called Bombay, called Mukund Joshi. Mukund is a lovely man and is now a grand ol...