Nigeness
Nigeness
Nice
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.
Latest Posts
On this day 60 years ago, the New York Poet Frank O'Hara died, following a bizarre night-time accident in which he was run over by a jeep on a Fire Island beach. The literary world was shocked, and his friends thrown into convulsions of...
Today is the feast day of St Christina the Astonishing, a 12th-century saint from Sint-Truiden, in what is now Belgium. Having suffered a massive seizure of some kind, she was taken for dead, but in the midst of her funeral service 'she...
I've just noticed that I have now exceeded 5,000 posts on this blog – Butterflies, Proms, Ibsen was number 5,000. I would never have seen that coming when I tentatively launched this Hedonic Resource on the world back in 2008. Anyway, I...
Just for the record – I recently wrote a piece on Ivy Compton-Burnett for Engelsberg Ideas.Here's a link...https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/ivy-compton-burnetts-forgotten-genius/
I spent most of the weekend in Derbyshire with my cousin, revisiting Buxton – the riverside gardens really are very fine – and, yesterday, taking a walk in and around Bradford Dale. As we wandered amid an astonishing abundance of...
Well, my impulse purchase of Damien Wilkins's Max Gate turned out to be a good one. Since I last mentioned it, I have finished reading it (at my usual snail's pace), and found it thoroughly enjoyable (apart from a few jarring...
'Imagine if we won the World Cup,' said my seven-year-old grandson yesterday. 'Ah, my child,' I replied, laying a grandfatherly hand on his innocent head, 'we have won before – and I was there.' Actually, of course, I made no such reply,...
Last night I found myself watching Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums again. I say 'again' but I hadn't seen it since I watched it, in a cinema, when it was released, all of 25 years ago. It was the first of his films I'd seen (I only...
Well, I am back, and it was a joy to see Gloucester cathedral again – if not the city of Gloucester, which is now, sadly, the very model of English urban degeneration, dereliction and decay. A sorry fate for a once fine town, and one...
Early tomorrow I'm heading for Gloucester for a couple of days' walking (or not) with my walking friends. Gloucester is very high on my list of favourite cathedrals, so I'm looking forward to seeing it again after too many years. I'm...
On today's Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp writes of the 'unsuspected kindness' of which, happily, the world still has abundant supply. He leads up to the subject by way of an anecdote about an exemplary act of kindness – of Christian...
Well, I didn't make it to London on Friday. The Euston train got no further than Milton Keynes (of largely evil memory), where damage to overhead cables up ahead had ended all serious possibility of getting to London, short of limping in...
I'm off to London today, so here's a post from some years back, in which I marked the July 3rd birthday of the actor George Sanders...Born on this day in 1906 – in St Petersburg, whence his family wisely returned to England in 1917 – was...
July already, and my late mother's birthday (she'd have been 105 today) – and it's Canada Day, marking the anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, formed on this day in 1867. It was on Canada Day in 1980 that 'O Canada' became the...
It isn't often that a sermon turns up in my inbox, but today – the 4th Sunday after Pentecost – one did, and it's rather good. Here's a link...https://www.rememberingsion.com/p/foundation-faith-sermon-4th-sunday-pentecostAnd of course...