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
It's Epiphany Sunday today. Here is something typically chastening from our best religious poet of recent times, R.S. Thomas – EpiphanyThree kings? Not even oneany more. Royaltyhas gone to ground, its journeyingsover. Who now will...
Well, here's a little Christmas mystery. Looking out of the window this frosty morning, I saw a scatter of white feathers on the lawn, and an avian corpse of some kind – a pigeon, I assumed, fallen victim to one of Lichfield's ubiquitous...
Happy New Year to all who browse here (and no, I've no idea what's going on in this image – something deeply French, no doubt). I managed to see 2026 in, despite relapsing into prostration more than once during the day. My first wish of...
Year's end, and I'm still coughing and still prostrated by this wretched 'cold' or whatever it is.I thought I might post a poem – last year it was Richard Wilbur's wonderful Year's End – but this year it's going to be, of all the...
I don't like to repeat myself too often, but I see that on this day five years ago I was writing about John Gray's rather wonderful Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life. I'm looking after (i.e. feeding) the Lichfield family's...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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;...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...