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Toast
I crashed out with a rotten cold last week, and took up Clare's recommendation to read Toast: the story of a boy's hunger - food writer Nigel Slater's acclaimed autobiographical memoir telling of his...
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Ups and downs
Rosa Raine, one of many visitors taking the 'picturesque tour' of the Isle of Wight in the mid-1800s, repeats a strange anecdote about the landscape near Shanklin: variable hills.An extraordinary...
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Rosa Raine's wanderings
I've just been looking in more detail at Rosa Raine's 1861 Isle of Wight travelogue The Queen's Isle. Its full title is The Queen's Isle: Chapters on the Isle of Wight wherein Church Truths are...
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The Primrose Way
Cross-posted from A Wren-like Note: Maxwell Gray's 1898 essay The Primrose Way. It's an interesting mix once you dig into the references: an evocative recollection of a lane (recognisably on the north...
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"Cabbages" and other parodies
Having been put off Thackeray at school, by being made to read Vanity Fair before I was able to appreciate its sharp social satire, I wish I'd read more of his works, which often go into outright...
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Gawain & the Green Knight
Oh, wow! Yesterday we went to the Four of Swords Theatre's Gawain & the Green Knight in Exeter Cathedral. If you're in the region, check out out future productions.Four of Swords is an energetic...
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"I shot Prince Albert ..."
"... but I did not shoot his architect". Further to Harriet Parr in Shanklin, I just ran into another anecdote from the memoirs of Lord Ernle (Rowland Edmund Prothero), in which he confesses to...
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On the Medina
More from Tuesday: from Whippingham Church, we headed southward toward Newport along the east bank of the River Medina: a rural walk not without traces of industry past and present.An aerial photograph...
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Father's Day
I don't write much directly personal stuff here, but I just wanted to share a photo of my father Morris, who we saw when we visited the Island last week.In 2011, I wrote a bit about the circumstances...
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Chine at dusk
We've been to Shanklin Chine several times over the past few years, but never in the evening. From 23rd May to 7th September, it's open until 10pm, and illuminated after dusk.Looking south via Godshill...
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The Shapters
One of my several defences of going to the pub is the conversation; and on Tuesday I had a very interesting one about Thomas Shapter, a doctor who features prominently in Exeter history, and whether a...
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Expectations
I always like revisionist takes on classic literature, and among various books I'm reading at present, I just read Ronald Frame's Havisham, which is a prequel and parallel text to Dickens'Great...
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Milne-Shaw
A recent post at the Ptak Science Books weblog - On the Continued Rediscovery of the Horizontal Pendulum - leads into an interesting backstory with roots in Birmingham, Japan, and the Isle of...
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Across Europe and Asia, by John Milne, Esq.
In 1875, the geologist and mining engineer John Milne had to travel to Japan to take up an appointment as an academic foreign adviser at the at the Imperial College of Engineering, Tokyo. Instead of...
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Micah Morey's Cave
John Ptak's blog Ptak Science Books has a very useful category - "History of Blank, Missing and Empty Things"- and this handily covers a now-lost Isle of Wight cave connected with a grim story.I ran...
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The men of Erith and other limericks
Literary attribution is a bit of a paradox on the Internet: how misattribution spreads so easily, despite there never having been a time when tracing attribution has been so equally easy. I just solved...
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The Long Memory
Moving to a setting just a few miles eastward from Erith ... The Long Memory (1953) is my favourite British 1950s film, acclaimed as one of the best British attempts at film noir. Having just tracked...
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Brixham: up to the Cavern
On Friday I decided to fill in one of the gaps in exploring local sections of the South West Coast Path, and walk from Brixham to Paignton. However, this was handy for a brief detour to look at the...
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Coast: Brixham to Paignton - part 1
I think I'm beginning to run out of local coastline to explore... On Friday I filled in one of the remaining gaps, and walked the South West Coast Path from Brixham to Paignton. It's a route that takes...
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Coast: Brixham to Paignton - part 2
Continuing from Coast: Brixham to Paignton - part 1: the walk from Churston Cove, a rocky bay of almost Mediterranean appearance, to Paignton via a succession of headlands and increasingly commercial...
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