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)
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 Northcliffean organ his creation, the Daily Mail, still is – or at least was when I...
I've only just realised, with a start, that today is National Beer Day. The date was chosen because it's the anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, which has something to say about standard measures of beer and other drinks – and also, one would like to think, represents our traditional liberties, of which the...
Born on this day in 1811 was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the prohibitionist bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was born, I was interested to see, in Litchfield, Connecticut, a small town that wisely changed its name from Bantam township, adopting the name of the great Mercian cathedral city, but inserting, for...
Yesterday's announcement of David Hockney's death was greeted by a wonderful outpouring of affectionate and admiring tributes – and quite right too. He was that rare thing, a genuine artist who was also widely popular and well-liked – the equivalent in painting, perhaps, of John Betjeman in poetry. Not easy to think...
Happy Aethelflaed Day, everyone! Aethelflaed (870-918), daughter of Alfred the Great, is remembered as the Lady of the Mercians, and is something of a feminist icon. With her brother, who later became King Edward the Elder, she ruled over much of Mercia from 911, successfully fighting off the Vikings. She died on...
Yesterday I had an appointment at a hospital some little way from Lichfield. For reasons I won't bore you with, I ended up arriving a full hour early. What to do? I'd noticed, on the way in, a red sandstone church standing apparently alone in the fields – Victorian by the look of it, and probably locked – but I...
Another day begins. Here is a starting-the-day poem by the great Richard Wilbur. It's just the kind of celebration of the domestic and the quotidian that got him such a bad reputation among the more 'advanced' taste-makers – more fools them: this is no simple celebration. C MinorBeethoven during breakfast? The human...
I see that the supermarket chain Sainsbury's is doing its bit to cut 'emissions' by removing brown eggs from its shelves in favour of white ones, which, according to its research, have a 12.7 percent lower 'carbon footprint' than their brown cousins. This major contribution to achieving 'net zero' has, of course,...
An American friend inquires – as well he might – what 'a Herbert Spencer of a cold' might mean. As I told him, I'm probably the only person on the planet who still uses the phrase (to universal bafflement). I came across it years ago in, I think, a novel by H.G. Wells (Love and Mr Lewisham?), where a character says...
I spent the weekend with my cousin amid the floriferous glory of Derbyshire at the turn of summer, with sunshine (much of the time) to heighten the beauty. However, along the way I discovered that, annoyingly, I was developing a stinking cold – which is now, on my return to Lichfield, in full dismal swing, a real...
G.K. Chesterton was born on this day in 1874. Max Beerbohm first met him in 1902 and described him as 'like a mountain, and a volcanic one – constant stream of talk flowing down – paradoxes flung up into the air – very magnificent.' They became friends, and Beerbohm admired him – within limits: 'I am not nearly as...
So there I was, in the supermarket car park, gazing happily at a tough-looking low-growing shrub covered with tiny white flowers (maybe a Contoneaster of some kind) – and there, drinking their fill of nectar, were three glorious Painted Lady butterflies, all in my field of vision at once. Some years that is as many...
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