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)
My review of Lea Korsgaard's The Butterfly Season is on Engelsberg Ideas, embellished with a rather lovely butterfly print by Rasmus Christiansen (a Dane). The link in the review should take you to a podcast reading of my earlier piece on the Aurelians – the reader is not me (I wish I sounded like that, but I...
It looks very much as if the swifts have flown, from Lichfield at least – a notably early departure. It's been a strange, but ultimately successful, season, beginning with the newly arrived birds absenting themselves for long periods from the cool, wet weather of late spring and early summer (and who could blame...
On this evening 14 years ago, I was watching, aghast, the television coverage of the London Olympics opening ceremony. My memories of it are mercifully vague, though I do of course remember the James Bond stunt with the Queen, all those nurses prancing about in celebration of that envy of the world, our NHS (which...
On this day 60 years ago, the New York Poet Frank O'Hara died, following a bizarre night-time accident in which he was run over by a jeep on a Fire Island beach. The literary world was shocked, and his friends thrown into convulsions of grief. At his funeral John Ashbery, fighting back his tears, read 'To the...
Today is the feast day of St Christina the Astonishing, a 12th-century saint from Sint-Truiden, in what is now Belgium. Having suffered a massive seizure of some kind, she was taken for dead, but in the midst of her funeral service 'she arose full of vigour, stupefying with amazement the whole city of Sint-Truiden'....
I've just noticed that I have now exceeded 5,000 posts on this blog – Butterflies, Proms, Ibsen was number 5,000. I would never have seen that coming when I tentatively launched this Hedonic Resource on the world back in 2008. Anyway, I reckon it's time for a poem, so here's a gem by Richard Wilbur. In the...
Just for the record – I recently wrote a piece on Ivy Compton-Burnett for Engelsberg Ideas.Here's a link...https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/ivy-compton-burnetts-forgotten-genius/
I spent most of the weekend in Derbyshire with my cousin, revisiting Buxton – the riverside gardens really are very fine – and, yesterday, taking a walk in and around Bradford Dale. As we wandered amid an astonishing abundance of butterflies – painted ladies, peacocks, red admirals, commas, gatekeepers, meadow...
Well, my impulse purchase of Damien Wilkins's Max Gate turned out to be a good one. Since I last mentioned it, I have finished reading it (at my usual snail's pace), and found it thoroughly enjoyable (apart from a few jarring anachronisms – 'Okay', 'in denial', 'basically'). It's actually the second Thomas...
'Imagine if we won the World Cup,' said my seven-year-old grandson yesterday. 'Ah, my child,' I replied, laying a grandfatherly hand on his innocent head, 'we have won before – and I was there.' Actually, of course, I made no such reply, not least because my memories of the great victory are hazy, and I could hardly...
Last night I found myself watching Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums again. I say 'again' but I hadn't seen it since I watched it, in a cinema, when it was released, all of 25 years ago. It was the first of his films I'd seen (I only caught up with Bottle Rocket and Rushmore later), and I remember being mightily...
Well, I am back, and it was a joy to see Gloucester cathedral again – if not the city of Gloucester, which is now, sadly, the very model of English urban degeneration, dereliction and decay. A sorry fate for a once fine town, and one that is all too common, thanks to terrible urban planning, bad architecture, drugs...
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