“When I woke up the next day I was a different guy”. For me that is the most memorable sentence from Keith Richards’s “Life”. It describes the effect on him of hearing Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” on Radio Luxembourg one night. As it says on page 58 of my hardback edition: “That was the stunner.… Continue reading “When I woke up the next day I was a different guy”
When I was 13 my mother brought home a reading list from my school’s parents’ evening. It was on the kitchen table the following morning. I guess that they gave the list to parents so that they could see what was expected of their children, and to make sure that the list made it home.… Continue reading A Teenage Reading List
Following on from previous pieces about finding “coincidences” in the things that I have read, seen or heard (links appear at the end of this post) here are a few observations from April, a month in which I didn’t listen to as much, or read as much, as in previous months. I have left Toni… Continue reading April’s “Coincidence Corner”
Last month (March’s “Coincidence Corner”) I quoted something from Andy Miller’s “The Year of Reading Dangerously (How Fifty Books Saved My Life)”, his wife’s advice on how to read “Middlemarch”: “Just do what I did. Read fifty pages a day and leave it at that.” Since quoting those words I haven’t even found time to… Continue reading So much for fifty pages a day
Following on from previous pieces (“What a coincidence” , “Porlock” and February’s “Coincidence Corner”) I have continued to look out for the connections (or what other people might call “coincidences”) between the books that I’ve been reading and other things that I’ve read, heard or seen over the last month. I have also managed to… Continue reading March’s “Coincidence Corner”
Last night, around 10.30pm, I finished reading “A Brief History of Seven Killings”, Marlon James’s 2015 Booker Prize-winning novel. This means that I have read every Booker Prize winner. As I have written elsewhere, the words “I have read” mean that my eyes were open and they passed across every word on every line on… Continue reading On reading every Booker Prize winner
Cricket, the sport rather than the insect. It could be considered Universal Knowledge for a billion or more people on the planet. Almost everyone in India or Pakistan, most people in Bangladesh, England, the West Indies, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand would have some idea of the game, and many of them… Continue reading How to Celebrate a Hundred
There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I alluded to it back in December, in this piece, and have been planning to come back to it. Does this happen to you much, with conversations? Do you start tell a story and then digress, and not get back to what you were talking about? Or… Continue reading That Tim Moore Quote
An alternative title for this Blog was “The Balanced Blog”, to reflect how often I find myself balanced between two views, or two extremes of behaviour. I was born on the day of the autumnal equinox and have often said (not entirely seriously) that that is why I’m well balanced. I can’t recommend it though.… Continue reading Binges and Balance
Is there a secret code that works its way through award-winning literature, unknown to the judges of literary prizes, or maybe known and used as a checklist by those same judges? Or is it just a “coincidence”? Over the years I have noticed that at least two of the following words or phrases often appear… Continue reading Filigree, antimacassar, daguerreotype, lapis lazuli
The Compartments 