It was when I was undertaking some family history research, twenty-five or more years ago, when many genealogical resources first began to appear online, that I came across Thomas Pooley. There were rumours in the family of an ancestor who had been imprisoned for blasphemy, sometime in the nineteenth century, but it felt like aRead More
One of the great pleasures, and privileges, of living in this corner of north Kent is the woodland. Near to where I live, there are three interconnected woods: Ashenbank, Shorne Wood and Cobham Wood, sadly bisected by the A2 and the Eurostar railway line. Each is an ancient woodland, made all the more interesting forRead More
The news that Mike Ratledge has died knocks away another of the props on which my formative years were built. Ratledge was a founder member and keyboard player for the Soft Machine, a man whose furious, buzzing organ sound – somewhere between a frentic soprano sax and a power saw – burned itself into theRead More
I was glancing through the statistics page of my Flickr account the other day when I noticed that I had just passed two million views. That feels like quite something for someone with limited photographic ability and maybe a narrow range of interests, or at least a narrow range of places visited and photographed. IRead More
In Woody Allen’s 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters there’s a scene where Mickey, a despairing television writer trying to seek a meaning in life (played by Allen, inevitably) is walking through Central Park. In the middle of his existential crisis he looks at the joggers who pass him by. We hear his thoughts: Oh!Read More
Last in my reviews of the year comes books (I saw many films but time has run out for making a constructive narrative out of them). I read a lot in 2024, though it never feels like I have read enough, always with a book at my side to the point that I practically panicRead More
For the third in my series of reviews of 2024 we have images. These are some favourite photographs of mine taken over the year. Each one has a link to a higher resolution version on my Flickr site. My favourite photograph of the year is at the top.
Next up in my series of posts on cultural highlights for 2024 is works of art. I visited some very fine exhibitions over the year, notably a number in France, including David Hockney’s ‘Normandism’ show at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen and a recreation of the first Impressionists show at the Musée d’Orsay inRead More
It’s time for my regular December round-up of favourite cultural highlights from the year, broken up into different topics, the first of which is music. Much of the music I listened, or saw live, over 2024 was old favourites, but there was some exploring among favoured genres: jazz, experimental, guitar music. Here, then, are someRead More
When I saw Bob Dylan play in 2022, I felt that maybe it was time for him to give up singing live. In the studio he had developed of late a meditative voice of limited range but haunting depth; live, in an amplified setting, his 81-year-old voice was completely shot. I wrote a blog postRead More