This is Illyria lady…
[Enter VIOLA, a Captain, and Sailors] Viola. What country, friends, is this?Captain. This is Illyria, lady. Tweflth Nigt Act I Scene II Well it wasn’t really Illyria but the stage… Read more »
Category: Social History
Life in the Lockdown
Note: Because of reasons of space the editor of the Battersea Society’s quarterly magazine Battersea Matters and myself agreed that my usual page 2 contribution should this time appear here… Read more »
The Corona Man Cometh
Strange that the first time I came across the word corona was as the name for a bottle of fizzy pop. The van used to turn up once a week… Read more »
The Tiny Grass is Dreaming…
Writer and broadcaster Adam Gopnik muses in a New Yorker article about the pitfalls of speaking in a language other than your own: “Once, in a restaurant in Italy with my… Read more »
Frying tonight…
Sometimes i feel like a priest in a fish & chip queue quietly thinking as the vinegar runs through how nice it would be to buy a supper for two. Vinegar by Roger McGough As English… Read more »
What’s in a name?
I answered quite happily to the name Michael until I was about thirteen when I decided I’d prefer to be known as Mike. If nothing else it was quicker to write and easier to spell. My… Read more »
Serviette or Napkin
It is one of the burning issues of our age, whether a properly brought up person (like what all readers of this blog are certain to be) should refer to… Read more »
On the back of an envelope…
When I was about fifteen – living in Somerset – I discovered penfriends. I can’t remember much about any of them and the long distance relationship was generally very short-lived…. Read more »
Salad Days
Sir John Evelyn, best known for his diary, was also a vegetarian and a fan of salads and would hopefully have approved of the salad pictured above. His 1699 book… Read more »
They flog horses – don’t they?
The writer of Ecclesiastes observed that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong – but he’d probably never tried to buy tickets online… Read more »