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 (223)
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 are still on the curriculum. Certainly the days are long gone when an easy...
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 by the early life of Tennyson, partly because of his connection to a county I...
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 poems of the nineteenth (or any) century. Let's celebrate the birthday with one...
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 light burnedThere; crusted buildingsCast their shadows: a brightSerpent, a...
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 lived eight more, I'll be all of eighty-four,And the prospect doesn't seem half...
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 room:The tablecloth a fresh snowfall orderedWith frail matzot that splinter at the...
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 Carol or Elf, or even, at a pinch, Home Alone – which in the event came top by a...
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 chock full; and the whole occasion was beautiful, numinous and joyful. I'll be...
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 tradition lives on (this applies only to true revolutions, not rebellion for its own...
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 lukewarm reviews, for some reason – I guess it's a style of painting that can...
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