Right up to my teenage years reciting a poem out loud or acting in the school play were essentially impossible. Learning lines was difficult enough but even if the words were memorised, the presence of an audience would strike me dumb. Performance and I were incompatible. Similarly, pretence and deceit were an anathema. One of…
Short back and torture
I reckon I have had my hair cut every 6-8 weeks since I was four, which makes last week’s my 500th. The trouble is that I have disliked each and every one, finding them at best unpleasant and at worst, plain horrible. I have nothing against barbers, I just don’t like keeping still and I'm not…
Labour of love
Our back garden had a problem. As soon as it rained the earth by the scullery door became all mud and puddles. After three years of inertia we decided to lay a paved path, edged on one side by a row of stones to restrain the herb garden, and on the other by a wall.…
Silver Lining
Yesterday in Kew Gardens it was a clear, cool Spring day with one of those pale blue English skies. Unlike previous visits over the past 25 years since I have lived in this part of London, you could hear birdsong not drowned out by the constant drone of aircraft a few hundred feet overhead and…
I name this blog..
At precisely 10.12 last Saturday evening (5 December) we were launched. After delivering a brief speech wishing well to all those who navigated in and around the good ship greyhares, Jeanette Reid clicked the 'blog visibility' button and we went live. Jeanette, grey haired and grey mattered (an Oxford physics graduate of the early 1960s), had won…
Talking ’bout my generation
It's no accident (except perhaps an accident of birth) that when Pete Townshend wrote My Generation in 1965, aged 20, he was referring to the postwar baby-boom generation. Despite the words of the song, I doubt he expected to die before he got old because, to quote a crusty member of the Old Generation, we had never had…