Archive For The “Life” Category
Do you daydream? I suspect you do, just now and again. Many of the people whom I know seem to meet with the temptation once in a long while, though they don’t all admit to it, let alone confess that they ever give way to it. But me – if truth be told, I must…
One of the two things I learned at school and can still remember (the other was that Samuel Johnson had a cat called Hodge whom he fed on oysters and described as “a very fine cat indeed”) was that young hares in their first year are called leverets. With this fountain of General Knowledge to draw upon, it…
I had been forewarned about the opening scene a few weeks earlier when I bought our tickets. I was about to pay when the smiley face of the man in the box office suddenly turned serious. He looked me in the eyes and with great solemnity delivered a prepared statement: “I should warn you, the…
Henry Wedson was a clockmaker, and a picksome craftsman of the best sort, gifted with sharp eyes, agile fingers and an acute mind. I encountered him in his tranquil workplace in a Gloucester suburb forty years ago, and spent an unforgettable hour in his company. It is too often said that, living as we do…
I was in a world of my own, puzzling over my recent run of form at chess – when playing against Fahar [see Reopening Gambit, Greyhares blog, 28 January 2016] it was most unusual for me to win four games in a row. Suddenly, all became clear; my success was thanks to my bishops and the…
Mrs Miller moved like a tortoise. All her movements were slow, nothing sudden, nothing jerky; she was certainly not someone to be hurried. It was a concern about her shortness of breath that brought her to the clinic, and the diagnosis was soon clear; she had developed asthma. But, for her sake, her eerie slowness also needed…
I loathe plastic. I detest plastic. I even… No, before I become downright abusive, I must put a question or two to the reader. Tell me: did anybody ever love plastic? Or even admire it? Did anybody even ask for it? Not that I know of. It was simply there, all of a sudden, dumb and…
Just after Christmas, my wife and I went for a week to our cottage in Brittany. Our key aim was to begin to prepare the garden for 2017. As usual, we stopped over for a day in Paris. There, the streets had the same tell-tale trappings as at this time every year. Dumped on the…
