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.
August 2026
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All posts (238)
Last night I watched It's A Wonderful Life again. I see that I last watched it at the start of this year, and wrote about it here, under the title 'It's a Wonderful Film'...'This wretched flu continues to toy with me mercilessly, one day giving every indication that it's coming to an end, the next surging back with...
Well, my festive 'cold' reached something of a peak (or trough) yesterday, and I had to absent myself from the festivities for a chunk of the afternoon and lie down in a darkened room. It was just like the old days, i.e. the days of my working life, when every Christmas (or so it seemed) I would be struck down by...
Here, by way of food for Christmas thought, are two Nativity poems by the great R.S. Thomas.First –'Christmas Eve! Fivehundred poets waited, penpoised above paper,for the poem to arrive,bells ringing. It was becausethe chimney was too small,because they had ceasedto believe, the poem passed themby on its way outinto...
Apologies for the hiatus. I was away at the weekend and, since coming back, have been afflicted with a stinking 'cold' – yes, just in time for the festivities, though I'm hoping it might be a short-lived one. Anyway, I see that today is the 220th birthday of Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism and, ultimately, the...
As someone who swears rather a lot (never in print, of course), I was pleased to come across this excellent research-based report on 'Why swearing makes you stronger'. Not only is swearing, as we all know, big, and clever, and enjoyable; it can also boost your performance, at least when it comes to holding your hand...
On this day in 1770, the newborn Ludwig van Beethoven was baptised. I imagine he bawled lustily. Beethoven was the musical hero of my boyhood and adolescence. Right up until pop and rock claimed me – it was the golden age, after all, mid-sixties to mid-seventies – Beethoven was the god of my worship, with all other...
Selecting a ReaderFirst, I would have her be beautiful,and walking carefully up on my poetryat the loneliest moment of an afternoon, her hair still damp at the neckfrom washing it. She should be wearinga raincoat, an old one, dirtyfrom not having money enough for the cleaners.She will take out her glasses, and...
When Tennyson sat his Cambridge entrance examination, it consisted of four subjects – Latin, Greek, Algebra and Natural Theology. Of those, the first two are in steep decline, especially Greek, though 'classical studies' in various forms are still on the curriculum. Certainly the days are long gone when an easy...
One of my birthday presents, and a very welcome one, was Richard Holmes's The Boundless Deep, the first of a projected two-volume biography of Tennyson. I've just started reading it, and am enjoying it hugely. I've long been fascinated by the early life of Tennyson, partly because of his connection to a county I...
It's Emily Dickinson's birthday today (born 1830, in Amherst). She wrote that 'To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else' – but it left her time to write, in her short life, large numbers of the most extraordinary poems of the nineteenth (or any) century. Let's celebrate the birthday with one...
R.S. Thomas wrote the justly famous Advent poem 'The Coming' (which has appeared here before) – 'And God held in his handA small globe. Look, he said.The son looked. Far off,As through water, he sawA scorched land of fierceColour. The light burnedThere; crusted buildingsCast their shadows: a brightSerpent, a...
Today Tom Waits and I complete 76 years on this Earth. I've written a song for the occasion – it goes to the tune of 'Seventy-Six Trombones' –Seventy-six years old, and I'm feeling fine,Seventy-six years old, and I'm glad – And when I've lived eight more, I'll be all of eighty-four,And the prospect doesn't seem half...
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