Nigeness
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Nige, who, like Mr Kenneth Horne, prefers to remain anonymous, was also a founder blogger of The Dabbler and a co-blogger on the Bryan Appleyard Thought Experiments blog. He is the sole blogger on this one, and his principal aim is to share various of life's pleasures. These tend to relate to books, art, poems, butterflies, birds, churches, music, walking, weather, drink, etc, with occasional references to the passing scene. His book, The Mother of Beauty: On the Golden Age of English Church Monuments, and Other Matters of Life and Death, is available on Amazon or direct from the author.
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All posts (242)
I reckon it's time for a poem. Here is one by Janet Lewis (wife of the eminent poet and critic Yvor Winters), who is perhaps best remembered for her classic novel The Wife of Martin Guerre, but was also an accomplished poet, active across six decades. In 'Helen Grown Old', she wonders what became of Helen of Troy,...
An old friend, knowing my interest in such oddities, has alerted me to a wonderfully outlandish theory that seems to have attracted thousands of believers, many of them already adherents of Flat EarthTheory. It all began ten years ago, when someone in Crimea, whose account has since been deleted, posted a video on...
The other day I was walking in Gloucestershire again, with my brother and walking friends – this time a stroll beside the Severn from Deerhurst to Tewkesbury and back. Deerhurst (a name that sounds more Kent than Gloucestershire) boasts a very remarkable Anglo-Saxon church – a large, complex building which is still...
I see that today is Oscar Wilde's birthday (born 1854). Here is something I wrote some years ago about him – or rather about an altogether extraordinary Max Beerbohm essay, 'A Peep into the Past'...'Browsing my overcrowded bookshelves with a view to some thinning out, I came across a collection of previously...
One of the pleasures of my boyhood was going round to my grandmother's flat to watch TV (we didn't have a set at home at the time). On Saturday afternoons my brother and I would join her to watch the wrestling (Kent Walton ringside), and on weekend evenings there would be such delights as Danger Man, starring the...
I was walking along Market Street (pedestrianised) this morning when a man, walking briskly in the opposite direction, drew level with me and, as he passed, turned his head and, looking me firmly in the eye and grinning cheerily, exclaimed: 'Growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, eh? The best of times, weren't they,...
Until I started reading (mostly for research, but I'm enjoying it) Apocalypse: A History of the End of Time by John Michael Greer, I had forgotten that the world was supposed to end in a mighty cosmic collision on the 21st of December, 2012. This could apparently be inferred from the ever reliable Mayan calendar (or...
I must admit to being rather mystified by all the brouhaha attending the display of the on-loan Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum. Surely if anyone was that interested they had only to hop over the Channel and take a look at it in situ in Bayeux. I was there some years ago, dutifully inspected it, and was...
Here is another poem by Dick Davis – and why not? He's one of the best (and still living). This one is a rare excursion into something very like free verse, and I think it works beautifully. The Departure of the MythsNow that the series ofTottering bedizenedEdifices goes topplingAnd tinkling intoThe distance,...
A melancholy anniversary today – one that seems to get worse each year as it triggers ever more naked displays of Jew-hate. However – a big, welcome 'However' – today is also the centenary of the first radio broadcast of Choral Evensong, the world's longest-running outdoor broadcast. Radio 3 is marking the occasion...
Yesterday Mrs N and I attended another talk (it was 'Enlighten' weekend in Lichfield, a series of events aimed at making us once again a 'city of philosophers'). The talk was by biographer and self-confessed journalist Anne Sebba, and the subject was her recent book, The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz. Unfortunately...
By way of the excellent AbeBooks, I have acquired a copy of Continual Dew: A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse, Betjeman's first commercially published collection (1937) – not the prohibitively expensive first edition, but a beautifully made facsimile from 1977, complete with gold fore-edge and India-paper insert. It's...
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