Newbie

It must have been well over thirty years ago, on holiday in North Wales, when, after visiting Beddgelert, we went for a riverside walk along what must have been the Aberglaslyn Pass. Noting the width and smoothness of the footpath and how it bored its way straght through some rocky outcrops, I remarked wistfully that we must be on the trackbed of…[Read more]

Fabulous blog again, Richard. I’ve always been fascinated by narrow-gauge railways. I’m not quite sure what it is, but maybe it’s the feeling of being able to step into (or onto) something that doesn’t look feasible. I remember my excitement as a child on holiday visiting the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway in Devon.

Mind you, you wouldn’t get me…[Read more]

They’d Chosen Me for Being Good at Isolation

Those harbour houses had slope-ceilinged attics with dormer windows. I’d been instructed to stay in one garret, squint out between curtains, send situation reports every two hours. A reconnaissance man, a civilian thought to be steady, I watched the quay below, admired the yachts and motorboats moo…[Read more]

‘you will mistake  the gulls

  for the  screaming of a girl

and run out of your flat

 to an empty landing’

No.

The landing is not empty.

You know what you see.

And the gulls, well, you should have remembered, they’re always there. Wheeling and calling, ghostly as Valkyries, looking for a better prize than picking at bleached bones of…[Read more]

I think I should belatedly clarify my last post by saying that, whether you believe that striking and picketing are right or wrong, that’s not the point I was making. The fact remains that the Labour Party was originally founded to represent the trade unions in Parliament, so Starmer’s action was a betrayal of everything the party once stood for.

No, I can’t say I’m impressed with Starmer’s ‘Labour’ party. So little so, that, given that we live in a rock-solid Labour seat and that it was plain the Tories were going to get hammered anyway, I was quite glad we were in the far West of Ireland on polling day and so had an excuse not to vote. How can a party leader who disciplines one of his…[Read more]

You’re quite right, and I made an over-generalisation instead of a point! What I was trying to say was that even though the superficial details of policy may change from government to government and party to party, the underlying assumptions are adopted almost intact. To borrow a cliche, the playing field remains the same. It may develop over…[Read more]

Interesting that you should say ‘since 1951,’ because I was remarking only the other day that the last government we’ve had that could truly be called socialist was Atlee’s. But I don’t think it’s true to say that governments since then have been pursuing the same, even more or less the same, policies, and indeed your second para gives the lie to…[Read more]

Thank you Knicks – Seagreen’s prompt really did its job!

“The country needed someone like her” is one of those things people say when they vaguely recall the 60s and 70s through the prism of relentless rightwing media. It’s as though the fact that you could buy your own telephone with better features than a Post Office one after the GPO was broken up for sale was a sign of Liberty leaping over the…[Read more]

There’s a couple we exchange visits with once or twice a year. I’ve known them both since we were all teenagers, longer than I’ve known MrsB, but whatever has kept the friendship going for all these years it’s not common political ground. About the only thing we agree on is Brexit, so most of the time we avoid talking about politics. The last time…[Read more]

I remember as a young child of nine or ten learning about the coal mining industry in Britain. The teacher confidently predicted that there was enough coal to keep Britain self-sufficient for as long as the next thousand years. Most sane, or I should say morally-sane people know that exploitation of fossil fuels in a way that releases pollutants,…[Read more]

Congratulations, Sandra! I love your story.

Thank you, @Seagreen for the comp. I enjoyed doing my pastiche of The Big Sleep. I find that kind of thing a useful exercise. Recently my own  sentence structures and vocabulary have seemed stuck in a rut. Studying someone else’s gives a necessary jolt.

It’s a fun thing to do if other Denizens want to…[Read more]

Fabulous! I loved each and every one of these. Sandra, very well done. I’ll remember this as I tuck into my light supper tonight.

Thanks for the prompt Seagreen.