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.
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All posts (221)
Last night I had a typically convoluted dream, of which, mercifully, I remember only one brief moment. A character rather like Sheldon Cooper (from that excellent sitcom The Big Bang Theory) is in a bit of a spin, frantically looking for something. 'Where is my Practical Misfit magazine?' he wails. Perhaps it's just...
Born on this day in 1880 was Alfred Noyes, a poet now largely forgotten, but for the gloriously melodramatic ballad 'The Highwayman', which regularly features in anthologies and in polls of the nation's favourite poems – and why not? It's pretty irresistible...PART ONEThe wind was a torrent of darkness among the...
It's that time of year again. Summer has elided into autumn, and that sure calendrical marker, the Last Night of the Proms, has been and gone. Watching it on television, I found this year's event rather underwhelming – too many musical 'lollipops' with little of substance to balance them, efficient but uninspired...
Lately it occurred to me that, what with one thing and another, I hadn't read a novel for quite a while – I think the last one was probably James Hamilton Paterson's Rancid Pansies. So I reached for a recent charity shop find, Muriel Spark's The Comforters. This was her first novel (one of the dwindling few I...
The poplars are fell'd... Ten poplar trees in Lichfield's delightful Beacon Park have been felled by the council, on the perfectly good grounds that they were shedding huge branches onto well frequented paths. But it is always sad to see them go. As Cowper put it, in a beautifully crafted poem lamenting the loss of...
Ever since the turn of the month I've been meaning to post a September poem – and now, thanks to an American friend who's an Emily Dickinson maven, I have one. Here it is...September’s BaccalaureateA combination isOf Crickets—Crows—and RetrospectsAnd a dissembling BreezeThat hints without assuming—An Innuendo...
'I suffer from a strong suspicion that things in general cannot be accounted for through any formula or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy, howsoever new, is no better than another. That is in itself a sort of philosophy, and I suspect it accordingly; but it has for me the merit of being the only one I can...
Today was the day of the Sheriff's Ride, a grand Lichfield tradition, in pursuit of which the Sheriff, riding on horseback and followed by a train of other riders – these days including many on bicycles – perambulates the city (in former times county) boundary, in a less hands-on version of 'beating the bounds'. I...
I've been off gallivanting again, but am now back home. This gallivant was a two-day walk (rather little of which was spent actually walking) down in Sussex, with my brother and the doughty remnants of the walking group. We spent the first day and night in Chichester, that fine town, where my brother, an expert on...
Walking in Monsal Dale (one of the glorious dales of Derbyshire) on a sunny day a couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to see large numbers of undoubtedly brown-skinned people walking the trails, frolicking in the water, and clearly having a high old time. At Monsal Head there was a group of decidedly...
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