Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

“Without faith there is no hope and no love. Faith comes before hope, and before love”. “I’m not very religious, I’m afraid,” I said. “You cannot know,” said the sheikh. “You have not really looked inside yourself, and you have never asked yourself the question. One day, perhaps, something will happen that will cause you [...]

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(19)42 and the meaning of life

(Eunice, R, with my mother and a cousin in the 1940s) Eunice, the last of my mother’s cousins, died a few days ago aged 87. I have vivid memories of holidays and Christmases spent with them in Colwyn Bay, North Wales, where her husband Don ran an optical practice and she ran a couple of [...]

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Adolf, Eva and Tolkien: LOTR vs the banality of evil

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall [...]

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Boggarts and Witches

Thanks to JK Rowling, many people now know what a boggart is. There was a time, however, when you needed a Lancashire heritage to understand the word. Lancashire doesn’t have a lot to offer the world other than the dubious delights of Blackpool, which I won’t go into here. Let’s just say it’s an acquired [...]

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The Castrato and His Wife

There is something infinitely sad about listening to the unnaturally high, reedy voice of Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato singer and the only one to ever make a sound recording (in 1902). When he died in 1922, Moreschi was a relic of a past era. The height of the fashion for castrati coincided with the [...]

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An Unlikely Romance: Thoughts on The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

romantic …conducive to or characterized by the expression of love… (OED Online) Last night I read The Road – straight through in one sitting. It had been sitting around like an unexploded landmine in the house ever since my son brought it back home for the summer. It’s the kind of book you really do [...]

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What I’ve Been Reading

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge Samuel Johnson Biography by Peter Martin The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai Contested Will by James Shapiro

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“Sir, when a man is tired of London he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life affords.”

Johnson’s house, 17 Gough Square, a photo by mefinx on Flickr. It is a truly horrible day weatherwise – wind and rain pounding against the windows in true autumnal fashion. If this keeps going until lunchtime, my first day back at work in the school library will be manically busy. I am trying not to [...]

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