1381 days ago
We moved to the Welsh Hovel 21 months ago and still we have some things in cardboard packing boxes. Not a lot but enough. But as rooms are renovated, one by one, and furniture is added, gradually those boxes can be unpacked. In a month or so I shall also be picking up more furniture from my late father’s house in Shipston including two more Victorian bookcases and so this week I have been going through those cardboard boxes.
2171 days ago
Today, Joshua and I opened the 14th window on his Advent calendar (the shepherds and a quote from Luke 2 v 15): the countdown continues. Don't tell most folks but there is no Christmas tree in the Gospels but it is now part lof Christmas and this morning my son and I picked up the seven footer below for £35.
2321 days ago
When I visit my dad, he urges me to take away one or two of the zillions of books in his house. Naturally I want to please him and do as requested but I am equally conscious that the Mrs reckons that our house in Bristol has too many books and that my suggestion that she bin her sociology books to make way for more of mine is not a runner. And now Joshua is collecting book after book as well...
2653 days ago
In most ways I am, as you might have gathered, the black sheep of my family. Am I allowed to use that phrase anymore? The rest of them work for the State, read the Guardian and believe in money trees while worrying about the poor polar bears drowning on melting ice caps thanks to wicked folk like Donald Trump and Margaret Thatcher. But in one respect I followed a family tradition in that I managed to get into the UK's leading seat of learning, that is to say Oxford.
2746 days ago
Lavinia Woodward attends Christ Church the Oxford College known as "the House". 17 Prime Ministers went there, it is the college of of the privileged elite. It goes without saying that like Evelyn Waugh I was rejected by the House and, like Waugh, ended up at downmarket Hertford. The House is for the blue bloods not great writers. Lavinia picked up her boyfriend on the casual sex app Tinder, then while off her head on drugs assaulted him, throwing a laptop and other objects in his direction before stabbing him in the leg with a bread knife. Jail beckons surely? Er...no.
3194 days ago
Evelyn Waugh is trending on twitter. I guess thousands of uneducated young folks are saying "who is she?" "Is she dead?" I say this only partly in jest, knowing full well that Mr Evelyn Waugh was male and died about fifty years ago. But it seems that the old reactionary is trending because Time Magazine has just named him as one of Britain's top 100 female writers. I rather despair.
I wonder how Time coped with George Eliot or indeed Acton Bell. Actually I do not wonder I just reflect on how stupid are most young people and most Americans. In some sort of Venn diagram of stupidity the editorial team at Time will be in that dark coloured convex sharpe in the middle.
The missing link you ask?
