Graham Dukes is a founder member of the Academy of Unlikely Bedfellows It really began a long time ago – I was a college student when it happened, sitting around with a group of colleagues, when (with blood glucose levels falling as the evening wore on) the conversation not unnaturally turned to food. What sort…
A thought for tomorrow
Graham Dukes calls for the abolition of February and March I have been thinking. I don’t do it very often, because it tends to give me a headache; however, I have some hope that one day it may earn me a medal. This particular train of thought started up a while ago when I found…
Sin and Mr Parker
Yesterday morning, just after eleven, I suddenly realized that I now been sinning for at least seventy years. I had already emptied the contents of my supermarket trolley into a shopping bag, but I continued to stand there, observing with more than a little fascination the purchases made by the amply proportioned lady fumbling in…
The name of the bat
Graham Dukes makes the case for the fluttermouse. Whatever one’s world view, one can hardly avoid having a sneaking respect for creation. The old seven-volume Taxonomy of the Animal World, that has graced our bookcase for years, is reason enough for that. I shall never digest more than a tiny fraction of it, but I…
Hyggelig, they say
It hasn’t happened to me very often during the last eighty years or so, but the last few weeks I have been completely at a loss for an English word. I’m fairly sure that it must exist, and I know that I shall need it, but where is it? I have done everything that might…
Yesterday’s news
It was a rain shower, sixty eight years ago, that started it off. My good father, who could never quite resist the lure of a jumble shop on any occasion, was on his way home without an umbrella when he felt the first drops. Mr Gittins’ tumbledown store, which offered unsellable leftovers from all around,…
Goodbye to all that
I should, of course, have known better than to go back there at all. But I am not particularly prone to nostalgia; I appreciated that the place where I once grew up was, even in those days, in need of change, and I was curious. So it was that I did go back, just a…
Singing for Dr Zamenhof
It was the spring of 1944; one could discern the season as one glimpsed the young leaves hesitantly peeping out from the trees that lined the tramway along the Bristol Road. Beyond that, Birmingham remained its proud but grimy old self, much as Victorian industry had left it, licking its wounds now from the Blitz…