In a Dabbler tradition which we've just made up, our New Year's Day post is a repeat of the best post from the previous year. This year it's this glorious exclusive extract from Jonathan Meades' memoir An Encyclopaedia of Myself, which we first ran in August. Enjoy! He rode his bicycle home ... Read More...
General
Erudite 'bun nating' Nige introduces the inventive pidgin language of Tok Pisin... Tok Pisin is a form of Pidgin English and is widely spoken in Papua New Guinea. It developed as a result of Pacific Islanders intermixing, when people speaking numerous different languages were sent to work on plantations in Queensland and ... Read More...
Douglas Dalrymple remembers his great-grandmother... Mary Irene and I used to hunt snakes in the fields behind her house. By July the mustard flowers and tumbleweeds had dried up and blown away to uncover the little holes where I imagined that snakes plotted and hid. Playing the chivalrous protector, I would ... Read More...
Vandals come in all shapes and sizes, and their targets and their reasons can be hard to fathom... Last year, when reading about Art Under Attack - a Tate Britain exhibition of pieces that have been deliberately damaged over the years by iconoclasts of one kind and another - I was startled ... Read More...
Ever wondered why Americans have an enormous family turkey dinner just before having to do it all over again a few weeks later? Author and historian Peter Firstbrook explains Thanksgiving for a British audience, including why it's so close to Christmas... Today, millions of families throughout the United States will sit down ... Read More...
Douglas has words of consolation for anyone who ever thinks: 'I Am Not My Job'... I started as a busboy and dishwasher at a greasy downtown bar and grill in California’s flat, hot Central Valley. I was “paid” (if you want to call it that) under the table. My duties included killing ... Read More...
Mark Pack explains why the work of a now almost forgotten political novelist is worth seeking out... A best-selling author shifting millions of books in the post-war decades, a renowned public intellectual, a friend of celebrities such as Marlon Brando, a highly respected political scientist and famous enough to feature in ... Read More...
Daniel Kalder discovers a French comic book about Vladimir Putin, which reveals much about how western Europe struggles to categorise the Russian president... As regular visitors to this site will know, I have an interest in bandes dessinées, i.e. French comics. Every now and again I like to bring a particularly ... Read More...
Welcome to the new and improved Dabbler! Yes we’re up and running again – apologies for the interruption to your cultural nourishment during the last few days. You’ll notice the site looks rather different. There will almost certainly be a few glitches that need ironing out. But the good news is that ... Read More...
'Story Of My Life: The Trials and Triumphs of Sandy the Scrapper' was a tale penned for children by Edith Monro Armstrong in 1914, and revised again for publication in 1949. It gives a dog's eye view of Edwardian Canada. Bill Atkinson, who is working on a new edition of ... Read More...
