Still Life With Cat

... now that the standard November pile of work has been whittled down almost to a reasonable level. (And don't think I'm not gratef...

Fans of Jimmy Webb might remember his 1970 album Words and Music (so vividly recalled by the magnificent Ten Easy Pieces 26 years later) o...

The combined effect of a mention of Bobbie Gentry on the current Lazy Sunday thread at Larvatus Prodeo plus the amazing clip of the equally...

Ten years ago today I was in the little Austrian city of Klagenfurt, capital of the southern province of Carinthia, teaching a four-week sum...

1915 1917 See also here . 1935 My dad, aged 8, with his parents. On the back of this little photograph my grandfather has written, in his fo...

Since 7 am yesterday, yes, Good Friday, the renovators have been at it next door, and by 'next door' I mean 'through the party w...

Since the bride and Ampersand Duck between them have already provided lovely accounts, in one case lavishly illustrated, of Laura and Dori...

As almost everyone who comes here knows for themselves already, a life spent reading fiction produces a swag of paragraphs that are not exac...

Caught by surprise tonight, when without warning the opening chords of 'Shelter From the Storm' came on the teeve as part of the dra...

Leslie Reid Goldsworthy, 1893-1969 Army, 1915-1918: France Gassed, frostbite. George Allen Kay, 1897-1970 Army, 1916-1918: France Gassed, he...

This is Leonard Cohen in 1970, the year I was in what's now called Year 12: he was thirty-six and I was seventeen. It was the year I fir...

Yesterday a dear friend who lost her husband in August held a quiet afternoon-tea-shaped gathering at her home, a 'one month's mind...