I was first drawn to Anna Kavan’s writing through her collection of wartime stories I Am Lazarus (1945) – the perfect antidote to the mindless cheerfulness of Blitz nostalgia. Kavan – the pacifist and anti-fascist – is having none of that delusion. But that’s another story. Twenty years later – in a time of Cold War tension and dread – …
My father did not bring much back from his six years of war. He would have had his demob suit of course, and I remember a leather jerkin that he wore into the 1960s. Then, in common with millions of other military personnel and civilians, there was the case of what we now call PTSD. There was also his War…
“I am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace, I like to paint simple things that are a little strange.” – Gertrude Abercrombie After Pied Piper and The Thinking, my explorations led me into the byways of British literature of WW2 evacuation and evacuees. On that journey, I made – and continue to make – discoveries: Writers and…
This post is in answer to the question “Operation Pied Piper: What were they thinking?” At least in terms of the evacuation scheme. The choice of code-name remains ambiguous. It begins with a little history. Napoleon In the first years of the 19th century, Napoleon made no secret of his intention to invade Britain, destroy the monarchy and take…
Many people know that the poet T. S. Eliot was very fond of cats and indeed created some wonderful cat characters and wrote poems about them. Many people also know that he loved practical jokes – things like exploding cigars and farting cushions. They may also know that he was a fan of detective fiction and wrote reviews for The…
Optimized for full cable reception, BlueTooth and wi-fi. The Hat on the Cat – Inspired by all the Amazing Hats at The Three Muses.
OuLiPo meets Anapestic Tetrameter and the mad, bad and dangerous to know Bored Lyeron (If you feel you must read Lord Byron, or if you are unfamiliar with The Destruction of Sennacherib go here.) The Seduction of Sir Knack-a-Rib The Shakespearian came down like the gulf on the wold, And his so-shorts were gleaming like sonnets of old; And the…
Daffodil: good fortune; pleasure; contentment; joy. – from the surrealist dictionary definition generator. Windy today so lots of daffodils nodding and bobbing about in the cheese. Here’s something from the Oulipo Compendium that’s not quite Wordsworth: The Imbeciles I wandered lonely as a crowd That floats on high o’er valves and ills When all at once I saw a shroud,…
There was a period in the early 1960s when my parents had a television (in those days you rented) and one of the programs I liked to watch was All Our Yesterdays produced by Granada Television. It was a look back in time based on the newsreel footage of that week twenty-five years ago – a week-by-week journey through the…
Shadorma – that wonderful bogus poetic form that is such fun to write – is perfect for the paean to the feline companion, the international cat of mystery. It’s also handy in keeping the basic arithmetic sharp. Six lines of 3, 5, 3, 3, 7 and 5 syllables. And done. She thrashes Her tail annoyed to Have to share my…
P.G.Wodehouse and A.A. Milne were the same age and in 1941 they were both close to 60. As young men about town in Edwardian London they had moved in the same social and literary circles, belonged to the same club and played on the same cricket team. They were friends. Bertie Wooster and Christopher Robin are of course fictional characters…
Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940. –George Orwell P.G.Wodehouse –…
A six-point manifesto from psycholinguist Frank Smith – another of those items found in the basement. I must have prepared it as a hand-out for some long-forgotten purpose or another. I was happy to be reunited. Frank Smith – who died last year – was one of those essential giants in the land of learning, literacy, and reading. I loved…
“Phosphorescence is a process in which energy absorbed by a substance is released relatively slowly in the form of light. … When the stored energy becomes locked in by the spin of the atomic electrons, a triplet state can occur, slowing the emission of light, sometimes by several orders of magnitude.” Phosphorescence is also the title of a book by…
