Guardian of the house
This is my very own Green Man, who protects my garden against evil spirits and malignant fairies. The spate of burglaries we experienced in this street also abruptly came to […]
Category Archives: England
A touch of magic at Seaton Sluice
These fresh, colourful figures seem to embody the spirit of the sea up here in the wild, rugged and beautiful north of England. I don’t know why I bothered to […]
Overacting in a Jam Jar
I have to put a plug in here for a charming little cinema that recently opened in Whitley Bay, which for those of you unfamiliar with the UK layout is […]
Eros strikes again in London
Piccadilly Circus is at the throbbing heart of London and for years visitors have crowded under the statue of Eros, which was originally designed as an angel of mercy but […]
Armstrong’s Cragside – almost parallel lives
William Armstrong is my favourite eminent Victorian inventor, maybe because he was a Geordie like myself, born in Newcastle in 1810. His house at Cragside – the house where modern […]
Fleeting time
I spent some of the best Friday evenings of my life walking home from London Bridge where I worked back to my flat in Pimlico in the 1980s. The route […]
Plague pits and theatrical ghosts in the West End
Most of the familiar but somewhat opaque names for different parts of London have real significance if you scratch the surface a bit. The Strand, for instance, is a name […]
Did Queen Boadicea catch the Hogwarts Express?
Some English monarchs have had a rotten deal in terms of their interment. Not all of them ended up in Westminster Abbey. The remains of Richard III were recently found […]
Tower of Lies
As I’m plodding through ‘Wolf Hall’ at the moment I thought I’d have a wander round the Tower of London again to absorb some Tudor atmosphere. It’s not difficult to […]
I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper
I’ve long fantasised about living in St Mary’s Lighthouse off the Northumberland coast, like Montaigne in his tower, surrounded by books and in splendid isolation. Incidentally, I hated the change […]
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