London – I’ll tell you what. It’s been snowing quite heavily for a couple of days now, and I can’t get enough of this weather. As soon as I got to work, I was the first – and I’d say only ever – one out on the third floor terrace, pushing prints into the thick…
Tag: History
If only it were all so simple!
The Gulag Archipelago – Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1973) The Mission – In an attempt to better keep track of my reading, I have settled on the idea that creating a short a post on the book with which I am currently engaged might prove a productive and useful undertaking. For the last 2 weeks, I have been spending every spare moment utterly transfixed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag…
When we get going
Forget 2016. It’s gone. Done. C’est fini. A dead parrot. It’s 2017 now and things are going to change around here. For starters, we won’t be taking any grumbling from any of you lot. It’s time to knuckle down and get a move, especially you at the back. I can see you. Heads down, we’re going to…
What we did at the oyster festival
One of the upsides to spending my weekends and summer holidays washing pots and dishes in a seafood restaurant on the Irish Coast as a teenager was that I was able to sample and acquire a taste for a wide range of strange and exotic foods whose very mention – almost without exception – induced…
Art reflecting life
I caught this impressive new mural by the 40HK CREW in Stucley Place late on Monday afternoon. As always, I immediately took a photo of the piece, however, the angle of the sun at that time of day resulted in a flare on my lens which I think somewhat marred the picture. Not one to…
Alexander the Great and Optic Neuritis
Right now, I am hauled up in my West London flat, having been excused from work on account of a nasty case of Optic Neuritis that has totally messed up the sight in my right eye. I’m popping enough pills to have made Hunter S. Thompson take note and trying to fight off the horrendous…
Saint Patrick’s Day Parade London 2016
On Sunday morning, thousands of revelers gathered in Central London to celebrate the annual Saint Patrick’s Day festival and parade. Patrick may be the patron saint of Ireland, but it’s not so well known that the man mythology claims to have driven the snakes from Irish shores was actually born in Britain. In light of…
Doing what they say you can’t
The customer information board at Camden Road Overground Station this morning. Walter Bagehot (1826 – 1877) was a British journalist, businessman and essayist.
Cooking George Orwell’s Long Lost Kidney Stew Recipe
On the day following King George V’s Silver Jubilee celebrations, 6th May 1935, George Orwell took a break from writing A Clergyman’s Daughter to type a letter to his friend and one-time romantic interest, Brenda Salkeld. Among Orwell’s usual topics of discussion (politics, literature, and low-culture) the author outlined what he described as a “wonderful” ox-kidney…
One for the poets
In the closing chapter of Augustus by John Williams, a novel I have just finished reading for the second time, I noticed yet another passage that I criminally overlooked on the first read. This quote appears in a letter written by the elderly and reflective emperor Octavius Caesar, to his friend, the historian and philosopher,…
The Romans and the Moralists
I am half way through rereading Augustus, a suberb novel by John Williams, author of the equally brilliant Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing, and noticed this particularly eloquent passage that I had overlooked the first time through. The quote is taken from a fictionalised 12BC letter from the political advisor Gaius Cilnius Maecenas to Titus Livius and…
A stroll through London Bridge
The other day, I was due to view a new flat in Stoke Newington and had literally traveled across the city when I received an email from the advertiser informing me that the room had just been filled. Upset but never disheartened, I decided to make the best of the day and explore a part of…