Crackers at Christmas
An American friend, now a long-term resident in London, remembers one of her first Christmases here when while walking past a brightly lit house on Christmas day she saw through… Read more »
Hello Children – Everywhere….
Those opening words and the heartily jolly tune Puffing Billy which preceded them are symbols of a Fifties childhood as evocative as Meccano, balaclava helmets and chilblains. Every Saturday morning… Read more »
Gordon Bennett – you couldn’t make this stuff up!
Back in my days at Manchester University at the end of the 1960s – long before mobile phones or instant messaging apps were available – you could ask at the… Read more »
The Sting!
What is the quintessential sound of a traditional English summer? The tinkling nuisance of ‘Greensleeves’ as an ice-cream van turns up in a suburban street? The incessant drumming of rain… Read more »
The Lion and Albert
I’m not quite sure why – sometime in 1999 – I bought the large glove puppet from the Aldi store in DIdsbury, Manchester. I was over fifty and had two… Read more »
Ducks in a row
There’s probably nothing that sums up mid-twentieth century middle class suburbia more than three ceramic ducks flying to nowhere on the wall of a terraced or semi-detached house. They were… Read more »
The Picnic
Some picnics are more memorable than others. I would probably put our alfresco lunch on a Sunday in June 2016 in the top ten. Our Californian friends Kurt and Bev… Read more »
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 »
I bid you goodbye
A student hurrying through Oxford on his way to a lecture saw his professor pumping energetically away on the front tyre of his battered old bike. He asked if he… Read more »
Children’s Favourite?
I doubt that many of the Dan Brown fans who visit the Temple Church ever notice the wooden plaque recording the fact that it was here in 1927 that one… Read more »