It happened on last Saturday’s supper visit to my old friend Wilfred. He had prepared, as he always does, some superb roast chicken, backed by plenty of red wine and followed up this time by a digestif that he called Génépy and claimed to have brought back from the Alps, though I suspect he had…
The Great Penderbell Burglary
For all of his seventy-seven years, my Great Uncle James Penderbell suffered from cold feet. Every winter, and almost every night, his toes became an icy Arctic blue, and they burned, itched and stung. His brothers might scoff that James was stiff at both ends and could only expect to have one bright idea every…
Ganga’s Motor Bus
Twice in my life I have felt very close to my grandfather. The first occasion was on a bright day in the late summer of 1933; old and very ill, but optimistic as always, he was wheeled out into his Warwickshire garden to sit for a while in the sun with his legs supported on…
Not so fast!
Graham Dukes contemplates Life in the Slow Lane It was not very long ago that I realised how much the slice of the world with which I am in contact was speeding up; it was positively running away from me, but also attempting all the time to drag me along with it. Not, you understand,…
The Man who taught his Dog to play Chess
Can you teach a shaggy dog new tricks? Graham Dukes knows a man who can... Some seventeen years ago – yes, it was 1999 – I made up my mind to become famous. It all started at a second-hand bookstall, where I picked up what had once been a correspondence course for budding writers of fiction.…
A short history of eating
Graham Dukes and partner Elisabet Helsing have just produced a book... No, we must be truthful. All that we produced on our own was an electronic bundle of words and notions; to turn that into a book we were reliant on a creative and sympathetic publisher, a typesetter with nimble fingers, and a professional printer with…
As you like it
Yes, it all started seventy years ago. I was fourteen years old, growing up as a faithful disciple of William Shakespeare. I had declaimed his noble words on the stage, I had stepped reverentially through his birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. And then one day, browsing in a seaside bookshop... Walter Ellis’s little book The Shakespeare Myth…
In search of the presentable potato
It began a fortnight last Saturday. I had settled down for an evening in front of my computer, intending (as I do on occasion) to get to the bottom of these stories one hears about the possibility of cultivating better, bigger and healthier potatoes in one’s back garden. Not that a more presentable output from…