It’s time for another day in Canterbury. Since taking up care of a senior person resident in the city there have been many days spent here. On the train down I am close to finishing Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, the science fiction novel that literary types allow themselves to read. Its story isRead 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
At last, after a year and a half at least, I got to see a day’s professional cricket. Having played some games for Members only, Kent County Cricket Club opened up its doors to ordinary folk such as myself. We had to book ahead, we were allocated seats, and the necessary constraints were a bitRead More
Back in 1981 one of my favourite haunts was the Albion Bookshop in Mercery Lane, Canterbury. Squeezed into its medieval plot over two floors, tightly-packed books climbed up the shelves to ceiling height, while central islands created alleyways through which I could venture through all – so it seemed – that the world of lettersRead More
Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with the theatre, ballet, opera and the dance … It is so organized that at all times it is compelled to reproduce the central action which characterizes all good drama from the days of the Greeks to our own; two individuals are pitted against eachRead More
I went to the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury at the weekend; my first visit inside the city’s new theatre. There has long been a Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury – I first went there in the early 1970s to see an Agatha Christie play, when the theatre was on St Margaret’s Street. Then it was rebuiltRead More