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
I've been down in Worthing these past few days (yes, again – and again on family business). A seaside resort in winter is not a terribly attractive prospect, especially if the winter has been as relentlessly rainy and bleak as this one....
Today is the birthday of the great Victorian critic John Ruskin (born 1819). The last time I marked his birth was way back in 2009, when this blog was in its swaddling clothes. I wrote then about the Ruskinian notion of 'illth', the...
Yesterday I was in London, having lunch with an old friend, who, it turned out, had not seen the rehung National Gallery (despite living in London – ain't it always the way?). As we were close by, we stepped in, and I had the pleasure of...
'So, this is death. Well.' With these words, on this day in 1881, Thomas Carlyle died, at the ripe age of 85 – remarkable longevity for one who seemed never to be in good health. 'Thomas Carlyle is dead at last, by the acknowledgment of...
I recently posted a couple of Venetian-themed poems by Robin Saikia which had impressed me. Seeking to find out more about this little-known but clearly talented poet, I discovered that he had published, in 2020, a dramatic monologue...
I spent much of the weekend in transit, travelling down to Guildford, in my old home county, and back again the next day. We were there for the post-wedding celebration of an old friend who has remarried – and a fine celebration and...
Yesterday I was walking in the Oxfordshire countryside with my brother and walking friends. It was a gloriously sunny morning – the first in a long dreary while – and, for a wonder, it stayed that way for most of the day, only clouding...
Despite appearances, R.S. Thomas, the crag-faced curmudgeon of Sarn-y-Plas, had a tender side, which showed up quite often in his poetry, as in this love poem to his long-suffering wife of 51 years, the artist Mildred (Elsi) Eldridge...
Yesterday Patrick Kurp posted a poem, 'Larkin's Typewriter' – a 5-4-5 sonnet evoking Larkin's sad loss of his poetic afflatus – by a poet I had never heard of before, Robin Saikia. Taking a look online, I discovered that Saikia has...
Manet Day again – the great Edouard's 194th birthday – and I realise that I've never posted on the subject of one of his best-known and most mysterious paintings, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe. There might be a reason for this, as I'm not sure...
The dismal weather of this interminable January – grey days, relentless rain, damp cold (the worst sort) – is only to be expected, I suppose, but it does depress the spirits and eat into the soul. It's time for a cheering poem,...
This morning Radio 3 noted the 65th anniversary of the first performance of Francis Poulenc's Gloria, in Boston, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The ever chirpy Tom McKinney marked the occasion by playing the first two movements of the...
One of the minor regrettable features of modern life (and there are plenty of major ones, heaven knows, but I'm not going there) is the prevalence of whiskers on men's faces: from the full-on righteous hipster beard to carefully curated...
Every morning these days, when I stare blearily out of my bedroom window – which commands a wide view of the trees all around – I see dozens of crows, lined up ominously on every branch, as if auditioning for Hitchcock's The Birds. There...
Life, in twelve short lines, by the wonderful (and still with us) Dick Davis –A Mystery Novel Alone and diffident You enter what is there: The world that does not care For your predicament, For mysteries of who You must become, or what...