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)
Early tomorrow I'm heading for Gloucester for a couple of days' walking (or not) with my walking friends. Gloucester is very high on my list of favourite cathedrals, so I'm looking forward to seeing it again after too many years. I'm travelling by train, so, knowing my luck, I'll probably end up in Tamworth again......
On today's Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp writes of the 'unsuspected kindness' of which, happily, the world still has abundant supply. He leads up to the subject by way of an anecdote about an exemplary act of kindness – of Christian charity – by that great poet and man, George Herbert, as recounted in Walton's...
Well, I didn't make it to London on Friday. The Euston train got no further than Milton Keynes (of largely evil memory), where damage to overhead cables up ahead had ended all serious possibility of getting to London, short of limping in very late, packed into a cattle-truck train and with no guarantee of a smooth...
I'm off to London today, so here's a post from some years back, in which I marked the July 3rd birthday of the actor George Sanders...Born on this day in 1906 – in St Petersburg, whence his family wisely returned to England in 1917 – was the actor George Sanders. With his good looks and crisp, sonorous upper-crust...
July already, and my late mother's birthday (she'd have been 105 today) – and it's Canada Day, marking the anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, formed on this day in 1867. It was on Canada Day in 1980 that 'O Canada' became the country's official national anthem (and one of the best). Here is the one and only...
It isn't often that a sermon turns up in my inbox, but today – the 4th Sunday after Pentecost – one did, and it's rather good. Here's a link...https://www.rememberingsion.com/p/foundation-faith-sermon-4th-sunday-pentecostAnd of course this led me straight back to Les Murray's great poem of faith, 'The...
In Eminent Edwardians (which I'm still reading, with great enjoyment), Piers Brendon tells of a curious connection between John Ruskin and the young Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, known to his family as 'Stephe'. B-P's formidably well connected mother consulted Ruskin about 'Stephe's vexatious habit of...
These are not the dog days – they come in August when the dog star, Sirius, is rising – but, by heaven, they feel like it. It's proper hot, as we say around here, and more to come tomorrow. At least the butterflies are loving it – to the extent that a Silver-Washed Fritillary paid a fleeting visit to the garden the...
On this day ten years ago – the day the result of the Brexit referendum was announced – I was walking in Surrey, where I took this picture. This is what politicians used to look like (take note, Andy Burnham)...https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2016/06/picture-of-day.html
McGonagall, thou shouldst be living at this hour...'Twas in the year twenty twenty-six, on the twenty-second day of June – Which many political commentators and others said was not a day too soon –That the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced his resignation To the...
Here's one for Father's Day, tangentially. A loose, joyful almost-sonnet, written by Gavin Ewart, sixty years ago this month...June 1966Lying flat in the bracken of Richmond Parkwhile the legs and voices of my children passseeking, seeking: I remember how on the13th of June of that simmering 1940I was conscripted...
More than a year ago, I bought a copy of Carlyle's The French Revolution, all three volumes of it contained in one slim India-paper volume. It has been my bedtime reading, off and on, ever since, and last night I finally reached the end, Chapter VIII of volume three, aptly titled Finis: 'Homer's Epos, it is...
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