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
I don't like to boast, but yesterday Lichfield, according to the Met Office, was the wettest place in the country, with 52.8mm of rain – that's two inches in the old money – falling in a four-hour period in the morning. I can't say I'm...
I've just realised that today is the 450th anniversary of the death of the greatest of all Venetian painters, if not of all painters – Tiziano Vecello, aka Titian.
Born on this day in 1899 (in Cairo, under the name Cecil Smith) was C.S. Forester, a novelist of a kind that was common enough in his day but now much rarer – a fine storyteller, a prolific, versatile and more than competent writer,...
Recently Johnson's ballad parody, 'I put my hat upon my head', turned up on this blog, apropos Marianne Moore's tin ear for meter. Browsing last night in a recent charity-shop purchase, The New Oxford Book of Light Verse – edited by...
At least three literary birthdays today – Max Beerbohm (born 1872, a birthday I've marked more than once on this blog), Jean Rhys (born 1890, on the Caribbean island of Dominica) and Jorge Luis Borges, mentioned here the other day as a...
Busy times, with much family activity, but I did manage to get away for a day's walking in the Cotswolds with my brother and friends, in the course of which I revisited the monument to the Bray children in Great Barrington church – 'one...
As a former librarian, I am always keen to learn of writers, artists and musicians vastly more illustrious than me who also worked as librarians at some point in their lives. So far, my list includes Proust (who took a job as a volunteer...
The weather has cooled off at last, and there was even a little rain last night, creating the first puddles I've seen in weeks – a welcome sight. With memories of the July-August heatwaves still fresh, here is an apposite Wodehouse quote...
Born 100 years ago today was Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher), the second wife of the poet, and apparently the one who made him happy. The couple lived in Kensington, just around the corner from Ivy Compton-Burnett, and their paths crossed...
Last night's Gardeners' World included a report from Farringford, Tennyson's estate on the Isle of Wight, where the garden, which had been entirely lost, has been restored to something very like its original appearance – much like an...
Well, here in Lichfield, we had a typically English eclipse – which is to say that a magnificent bank of cloud (something scarcely seen in the past three weeks) rolled into place bang on time, right in front of the eclipsing sun, and in...
Last night I strayed from my usual listening home on Radio 3 to my former home, Radio 4, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the current Book at Bedtime is Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, one of those classics that these...
I've been reading Wodehouse at bedtime – actually dipping into this volume – and this morning, browsing on Facebook, I came across a Wodehouse anecdote. It seems that someone signing themselves 'Indignant' wrote a letter to the press...
Here is a little August nocturne by Thomas Hardy, a man who has been strangely present to me since my recent reading of Max Gate (in which he is, for the most part, strangely absent). Hardy's nocturnal visitors are a daddy-longlegs or...
Well, I can't really let Tennyson's birthday go unmarked (he was born on this day in 1809, at the vicarage of Somersby in the beautiful Lincolnshire Wolds). With all the talk of this Ulysses film (which I have no intention of seeing),...