Nigeness
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.
Latest Posts
As the BBC's lawyers try to find a form of words that will appease the Orange Man Across the Water – to the BBC an embodiment of all that is wrong with the world – and thereby avoid having to pay him extremely hefty damages, I find...
On Armistice Day, the mind inevitably turns to the 'war poets' – a mixed bunch, some of whom overtly took war and 'the pity of war' as their subject, approaching it head-on, while others, notably Edward Thomas, were more tangential in...
I see that it was 100 years ago today that Richard Burton (né Richard Walter Jenkins Jr) was born – that would explain why I happened upon Under Milk Wood on the radio the other day (and felt no kindlier towards it for having heard it...
I've been reading about a character called Richard Brothers, who styled himself as, among other things, the Revealed Prince of the Hebrews, the Slain Lamb of the Revelation, and God Almighty's Nephew – this last title, in particular,...
My friend the Emily Dickinson maven sends me many a Dickinson gem that I've never come across before (I came late to her poetry). One of the latest was this November poem, with its startling final image – who but Emily Dickinson could...
The great Venetian genre painter Pietro Longhi, born on this day in 1701, painted mostly indoor scenes – including his famous Exhibition of a Rhinoceros in Venice – but he sometimes ventured outdoors, as in this typically cheery scene of...
On this day in 1957 a mongrel from the streets of Moscow was launched into orbit around the Earth, strapped into the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 – the first dog in space. Laika, as she was named, was never going to survive the journey,...
I noticed this morning that the front page of one of the nationals claimed that the Lichfield heckle was the 'last straw' for the King, and stung him into decisive action, banishing his brother, the erstwhile Duke of York and Prince...
Halloween, Schmalloween – here at Nigeness, 31st October is always Keats's birthday (born 1795, in Moorgate, London, where his father was ostler at the Swan and Hoop inn). On this day in 1818, Keats signed off on his long letter to his...
On this day in 1618, having fallen foul of the monarch once too often, Sir Walter Ralegh, explorer, statesman, soldier and superb writer of poetry and prose, faced death on the scaffold in Old Palace Yard, Westminster. He urged the...
I see that another statue of Jane Austen has been unveiled, this time in Winchester Cathedral close. Fair enough – it's her 250th anniversary year, and she died at Winchester and is buried in the cathedral. The statue is by Martin...
Heaven knows how many Penguin books must have passed through my hands in the course of my reading life. They've always been there, right from my boyhood, when my father, for some reason, kept shelves of Penguins, mostly Crime, in the...
On this day in 1901, Annie Edson Taylor ensured her place in the annals of human folly by going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. It was her 63rd birthday, though she claimed to be 20 years younger, and she entered the barrel –...
In Worthing, the dogs are back on the beach (from which they are banned from May to September) and are happily chasing balls thrown by their obliging owners. And now the crows, of which there are legions, are joining in. Keeping a beady...
On a blustery, rainy, altogether miserable afternoon, I found myself thinking, inevitably, of Philip Larkin. I knew his uncollected autumn poem of 1961 – 'And now the leaves suddenly lose strength.Decaying towers stand still, lurid,...