I was not sent into this world to be happy, nor to search for happiness. I was sent for a special work.
(The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley)
Latest Posts
A tale of lottery-funded hubris
The need has gone; the memorial thereof remains.
(Fasti – Ovid)
Under suspicion: some writers and artists in the English countryside
The English countryside was once a refuge for writers and artists of slender means. The life was peaceful, the air was fresh, and the rents were cheap. But like exotic plants transplanted to alien soil, they brought their own peculiarities to their new habitat. And they could arouse suspicion and sometimes loathing in the natives. Read More
The bicycle’s final journey, to the centre of the Earth
It was a gentle devouring to begin with. The abandoned bicycle was settled into the bed of leaves and twigs, and then caressed and entwined by grass, nettles, cobwebs, and questing finger-like branches. Read More
A Hertfordshire witch-swimming
One day in 1745 in the hamlet of Gubblecote, near Tring in Hertfordshire, an elderly woman named Ruth Osborne went to beg for some buttermilk at a local farm. She lived in poverty with her husband, John, neither of them able to get much work or support from their neighbours. The Osbornes were shunned for the dual reasons that they were thought to be both witches and Jacobites (1745 also happened to be the year of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rising). Read More
City of Song: A London Sixties Music Trail
My new book, the second in the London Trails series, is out now. City of Song: A London Sixties Music Trail takes the reader on a walk from Chelsea to Soho, stopping off at twenty-four locations that hosted significant musical performances, encounters and happenings in that decade. Read More
