Nigeness
Nigeness
Nice
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.
Latest Posts
Last night I found myself watching Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums again. I say 'again' but I hadn't seen it since I watched it, in a cinema, when it was released, all of 25 years ago. It was the first of his films I'd seen (I only...
Well, I am back, and it was a joy to see Gloucester cathedral again – if not the city of Gloucester, which is now, sadly, the very model of English urban degeneration, dereliction and decay. A sorry fate for a once fine town, and one...
Early tomorrow I'm heading for Gloucester for a couple of days' walking (or not) with my walking friends. Gloucester is very high on my list of favourite cathedrals, so I'm looking forward to seeing it again after too many years. I'm...
On today's Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp writes of the 'unsuspected kindness' of which, happily, the world still has abundant supply. He leads up to the subject by way of an anecdote about an exemplary act of kindness – of Christian...
Well, I didn't make it to London on Friday. The Euston train got no further than Milton Keynes (of largely evil memory), where damage to overhead cables up ahead had ended all serious possibility of getting to London, short of limping in...
I'm off to London today, so here's a post from some years back, in which I marked the July 3rd birthday of the actor George Sanders...Born on this day in 1906 – in St Petersburg, whence his family wisely returned to England in 1917 – was...
July already, and my late mother's birthday (she'd have been 105 today) – and it's Canada Day, marking the anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, formed on this day in 1867. It was on Canada Day in 1980 that 'O Canada' became the...
It isn't often that a sermon turns up in my inbox, but today – the 4th Sunday after Pentecost – one did, and it's rather good. Here's a link...https://www.rememberingsion.com/p/foundation-faith-sermon-4th-sunday-pentecostAnd of course...
In Eminent Edwardians (which I'm still reading, with great enjoyment), Piers Brendon tells of a curious connection between John Ruskin and the young Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, known to his family as 'Stephe'. B-P's formidably...
These are not the dog days – they come in August when the dog star, Sirius, is rising – but, by heaven, they feel like it. It's proper hot, as we say around here, and more to come tomorrow. At least the butterflies are loving it – to the...
On this day ten years ago – the day the result of the Brexit referendum was announced – I was walking in Surrey, where I took this picture. This is what politicians used to look like (take note, Andy...
McGonagall, thou shouldst be living at this hour...'Twas in the year twenty twenty-six, on the twenty-second day of June – Which many political commentators and others said was not a day too soon –That the Prime Minister, Sir Keir...
Here's one for Father's Day, tangentially. A loose, joyful almost-sonnet, written by Gavin Ewart, sixty years ago this month...June 1966Lying flat in the bracken of Richmond Parkwhile the legs and voices of my children passseeking,...
More than a year ago, I bought a copy of Carlyle's The French Revolution, all three volumes of it contained in one slim India-paper volume. It has been my bedtime reading, off and on, ever since, and last night I finally reached the end,...
I'm greatly enjoying Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians, finding it rather more agreeable reading than Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Reading about the egregious press baron Lord Northcliffe brought home to me what a very...