Who wants to start a school? (Idle thoughts for a wet afternoon) Well just about everyone it seems. We all went to school so we are all experts on education. And there’s money to be made. In a world anxious about the future, lots of it. So all kinds of entrepreneurs, chancers and/or idealists are starting their pop-ups or opening…
The November #6degrees is freestyle. Instead of everyone starting in the same place with the same book, each participant starts with the last book on a previous chain or – if a newcomer – with the last book they read. #6degrees is the book version of Six Degrees of Separation. It usually starts with a book suggested by Kate at…
A musical backdrop to Unreal City: the London of the Lonely Londoners When the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in June 1948 there were a good number of musicians on board. We know that Jamaican musician Delroy Stephens was there because he organized a fundraising concert to pay for the fare for one of the stowaways -Evelyn Wauchope from Jamaica.…
This is not really a book review, although I did re-read, and enjoy The Lonely Londoners as part of the #1956club. It is rather an excuse to pull out some quotations, share some research and images, and post a quite remarkable documentary. Along the way my journey took me deep into the North Kensington of the novel – a part…
And the #1956Club is open for business and this time I’m joining and you can too.. I’m old enough to actually remember quite a bit about 1956 and it’s technically possible that I read some of these books in the year they were published. I was an avid three books plus a week reader as a child and at eight…
As a starting point for a chain of connections #sixdegrees The Turn of the Screw has everything. Is it a mystery story or a study in overwrought and morbid psychology? There’s gothic horror, ghosts and governesses. Jane Eyre and Murdoch’s The Unicorn come to mind. It starts on Christmas Eve; there are strange children, one of whom has, for some…
Long before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, bookish teens had Iris Murdoch. As the poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) explained in Annus Mirabilis, sex was invented in 1963 Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban And the Beatles’ first…
The US Department of ‘Justice’ declared this week that New York City — along with Portland and Seattle — to be a “jurisdiction permitting violence and destruction property.” Allegedly our state and local government are permitting anarchy, violence, and destruction So of course I had to take a look. So far, this is what I can report: Weather: Warm, sunny,…
Six stops on the Hammersmith and City from Euston Square to Westbourne Park, up the stairs, along the bridge over the lines that run east to Paddington and west to Wales, Change at Didcot for Oxford, Change at Swindon for Gloucester and Cheltenham Spa. Turn right out of the yellow-brown station past the Extra! Extra! and the Metropolitan with its…
The frogs were in fine parliamentary form this morning. Nothing like a heavy downpour to cheer them right up. Rabbits curiously absent and hardly a bird in sight or sound save for two guinea fowl pecking on the side of the track. And that wraps up the wild-life report from the daily stroam. Here are a few photos taken on…
There’s a move afoot to rename the ten American military bases named for Confederates No more forts named for the traitors and white supremacists of the Confederacy. Here’s Elizabeth Warren on the subject: If they are to be renamed for successful military figures who were not traitors, how about Fort Tubman? Tubman – the first woman to lead an armed…
Knowing that as far as our Federal Government is concerned I am – along with pretty much everyone else – expendable, I am committed to avoiding contracting COVID-19. So that means not going shopping. And it means arranging for deliveries. Almost a full time occupation in itself. And that means someone else taking the risks on my behalf because they…
There I was I was minding my own business drinking an early morning cuppa in isolation, socially distanced and hunkered when there was a flash of lightning and a tremendous thunderclap right overhead. Just one, followed a quick pelt of rain. And because I was deep in The Black Death – the way one is in the novelty phase of…
What Schools Have To Be About Now A colleague shared an article – That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief from the Harvard Business Review and it struck a chord. Suddenly – with the pandemic – the future, that had been lurking and looming on a horizon in plain sight, had arrived all at once. And everything was different and everything…
They say the war is over. But water still Comes bloody from the taps. from ‘Redeployment,’ Howard Nemerov In April 1961 the BBC Light program broadcast the first episode of a new radio drama: The Avenue Goes to War. It was based on the R. F. Delderfield novel of the same name. It’s the story of one suburban street in…