Nigeness
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Nige, who, like Mr Kenneth Horne, prefers to remain anonymous, was also a founder blogger of The Dabbler and a co-blogger on the Bryan Appleyard Thought Experiments blog. He is the sole blogger on this one, and his principal aim is to share various of life's pleasures. These tend to relate to books, art, poems, butterflies, birds, churches, music, walking, weather, drink, etc, with occasional references to the passing scene. His book, The Mother of Beauty: On the Golden Age of English Church Monuments, and Other Matters of Life and Death, is available on Amazon or direct from the author.
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All posts (238)
One of the pleasures of my boyhood was going round to my grandmother's flat to watch TV (we didn't have a set at home at the time). On Saturday afternoons my brother and I would join her to watch the wrestling (Kent Walton ringside), and on weekend evenings there would be such delights as Danger Man, starring the...
I was walking along Market Street (pedestrianised) this morning when a man, walking briskly in the opposite direction, drew level with me and, as he passed, turned his head and, looking me firmly in the eye and grinning cheerily, exclaimed: 'Growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, eh? The best of times, weren't they,...
Until I started reading (mostly for research, but I'm enjoying it) Apocalypse: A History of the End of Time by John Michael Greer, I had forgotten that the world was supposed to end in a mighty cosmic collision on the 21st of December, 2012. This could apparently be inferred from the ever reliable Mayan calendar (or...
I must admit to being rather mystified by all the brouhaha attending the display of the on-loan Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum. Surely if anyone was that interested they had only to hop over the Channel and take a look at it in situ in Bayeux. I was there some years ago, dutifully inspected it, and was...
Here is another poem by Dick Davis – and why not? He's one of the best (and still living). This one is a rare excursion into something very like free verse, and I think it works beautifully. The Departure of the MythsNow that the series ofTottering bedizenedEdifices goes topplingAnd tinkling intoThe distance,...
A melancholy anniversary today – one that seems to get worse each year as it triggers ever more naked displays of Jew-hate. However – a big, welcome 'However' – today is also the centenary of the first radio broadcast of Choral Evensong, the world's longest-running outdoor broadcast. Radio 3 is marking the occasion...
Yesterday Mrs N and I attended another talk (it was 'Enlighten' weekend in Lichfield, a series of events aimed at making us once again a 'city of philosophers'). The talk was by biographer and self-confessed journalist Anne Sebba, and the subject was her recent book, The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz. Unfortunately...
By way of the excellent AbeBooks, I have acquired a copy of Continual Dew: A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse, Betjeman's first commercially published collection (1937) – not the prohibitively expensive first edition, but a beautifully made facsimile from 1977, complete with gold fore-edge and India-paper insert. It's...
Yesterday I accompanied Mrs N – who is rather keener on this sort of thing than I am – to an event in the cathedral titled 'Keeping the Faith: Can Christianity Save the West?' Three good guest speakers were lined up – Jamie Franklin, author of The Great Return: Why Only a Restoration of Christianity Can Save Western...
Here's my latest piece in Literary Review – a round-up of recent books about death and longevity [the wording differs very slightly from the printed version]...End of the Line‘It is the strangest of all truths. We will all die. We all know we will die. But few of us truly believe we will die, few of us can imagine...
Born on this day in 1920 was Walter Matthau (who was not, as he liked to claim, born Walter Foghorn Matuschanskyasky, but plain Walter John Matthow). With his hangdog face and wisecracking cynicism, he was the perfect foil to his friend Jack Lemmon, with whom he made ten films. Here is my favourite Matthau anecdote:...
From a book I'm reading for review (of which more in due course, no doubt), I learn of a surprising business venture undertaken by Daniel Defoe, a man full of bright ideas but entirely devoid of commercial nous. Finding himself broke and heavily in debt in 1692, having run through his wife's considerable fortune and...
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