During the holiday season we're running a few repeats from the archives. Let's cheer ourselves up after a rotten week with one from September 2010... here's Patrick Kurp on some joyful music... What these performances have in common besides the pleasure I take in watching and listening to them is the ... Read More...

As a follow-up to Mahlerman's wonderful Lazy Sunday post on Wagner, we thought Worm's piece from August 2010 would be a suitable episode in our season of holiday repeats... It is fortunate for us mere mortals that the sexual escapades that consume and torment the greatest artistic geniuses often produce such an ... Read More...

From the August 2010 archives, Bryan Appleyard is struck by a still from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times... I was never much taken with Charlie Chaplin, too cute, I preferred the comparative austerity of Buster Keaton. But a couple of days ago I came across this picture. It is the last shot ... Read More...

What with it being holiday time we're going to be posting a few Worth Repeating posts Monday to Friday. It's quite a treat, really. Here's Brit from ages ago, back when we'd just started this here blog (almost exactly a year ago to the day, August 3rd 2010). “I threw up ... Read More...

I think (after much agonising, for there is stiff competition here) that my favourite bit of William McGonagall - widely regarded as Britain's worst ever poet - is this verse from The Ancient Town at Leith, purely for the scrupulous attention to numerical accuracy: Then as for Leith Fort, it was ... Read More...

Dabbler editor Gaw recalls his time in Russia... Walking back to my hotel in Nizhny Novgorod in the early hours. It's too cold to smoke and the snow's so thick on the ground the only way to get around is to walk down the middle of the road, jumping into a ... Read More...

Ben Atherton is a Brisbane-based journalist, dad, misty-eyed expat and sometime blogger on books and bookmen at Biblioparrot. Back in the good old days, when I was trying to get my first job on newspapers, a standard interview question was: "Why do you want to become a journalist?". The standard answer ... Read More...

Back in November 2010, The Dabbler stumbled across this rather extraordinary and wonderful project - a family tree tracing British pub names and signs. The pub genealogist himself - graphic designer Jonathan Chadwick - kindly supplied us with an up-to-date version of the Pub Tree (click the image for the ... Read More...

“Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reach’d the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean”. Samuel Taylor Coleridge The "secret river" has long been an obsession of dabblers, perhaps since the times when we lived in caves, and our ancestors ... Read More...

Inhabitants of the inner city have to take their country pleasures where they find them. So my sons' going to a supervised birthday in Stoke Newington provided an opportunity for a stroll around the more bucolic parts of the district. The party was held at Pirates Playhouse, a many-storied soft-play centre ... Read More...