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
As someone who swears rather a lot (never in print, of course), I was pleased to come across this excellent research-based report on 'Why swearing makes you stronger'. Not only is swearing, as we all know, big, and clever, and enjoyable;...
On this day in 1770, the newborn Ludwig van Beethoven was baptised. I imagine he bawled lustily. Beethoven was the musical hero of my boyhood and adolescence. Right up until pop and rock claimed me – it was the golden age, after all,...
Selecting a ReaderFirst, I would have her be beautiful,and walking carefully up on my poetryat the loneliest moment of an afternoon, her hair still damp at the neckfrom washing it. She should be wearinga raincoat, an old one, dirtyfrom...
When Tennyson sat his Cambridge entrance examination, it consisted of four subjects – Latin, Greek, Algebra and Natural Theology. Of those, the first two are in steep decline, especially Greek, though 'classical studies' in various forms...
One of my birthday presents, and a very welcome one, was Richard Holmes's The Boundless Deep, the first of a projected two-volume biography of Tennyson. I've just started reading it, and am enjoying it hugely. I've long been fascinated...
It's Emily Dickinson's birthday today (born 1830, in Amherst). She wrote that 'To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else' – but it left her time to write, in her short life, large numbers of the most extraordinary...
R.S. Thomas wrote the justly famous Advent poem 'The Coming' (which has appeared here before) – 'And God held in his handA small globe. Look, he said.The son looked. Far off,As through water, he sawA scorched land of fierceColour. The...
Today Tom Waits and I complete 76 years on this Earth. I've written a song for the occasion – it goes to the tune of 'Seventy-Six Trombones' –Seventy-six years old, and I'm feeling fine,Seventy-six years old, and I'm glad – And when I've...
Here is a poem for our time – a time when Jew-hatred, the oldest hatred of all, is resurgent yet again. This simple, touching account of a family celebrating Passover is by Charles Causley. SederThe room is at first sight a winter...
I see the British Board of Film Classification has conducted a poll to find the nation's favourite Christmas film. The results are pretty bizarre. I suppose if It's A Wonderful Life didn't exist, you might go for The Muppets Christmas...
December already, and Advent. I was in the cathedral yesterday for a candlelit ceremony of readings and music, including the Great 'O' Antiphons. The choir was on top form, creating some quite extraordinary harmonies; the cathedral was...
Recently I wrote about Richard Wilbur's precept: 'In poetry, all the revolutions are palace revolutions' – in other words, all true revolutions take place within the living tradition, the poetic heritage; nothing is overthrown, the...
Yesterday I was in the wicked city, having lunch with an old friend and visiting the pointillism exhibition, Radical Harmony, at the National Gallery. This display of paintings from the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, seems to have had...
Born on this day (in 1920) was the actor Buster Merryfield, who achieved fame as 'Uncle Albert' in the sitcom Only Fools and Horses, which I rate as the best long-running British sitcom ever (though, like most, it ran a little bit too...
The recent cold snaps have put paid to the last of the summer's wasps and flies, though the latter have hung around rather longer. When it come to flies, I (unlike Mrs N) take the line favoured by Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy: 'Go—says...