Prepare to weep for your lost youth and joy... First Heart-Rending Elegy In Loopy Copse, when I was young, all golden were the shrubs and trees. All golden I remember them, and Bonkers Maisie from the farm. Maisie was unkempt and mad, just like her brother and her dad. Her sister left them long ago. ... Read More...
Search Results for: frank key
There was a time when you didn't know even the things you've always just known... I remember the first time I saw the Beatles on television. It was a studio performance of “We Can Work It Out”, which the Wikipedia tells me was filmed on 23 November 1965, so presumably I ... Read More...
I’m afraid I’ve never been able to take Wales seriously. My troubles begin, shallowly, with the bilingual road signs, which are funny if the Welsh is very different from the English (Please drive carefully - Gryywch yn ofalus) and even funnier if it is similar (Millennium Stadium - Stadiwm y ... Read More...
Good evening. My name is Big Ears. You may know me from the books about the wooden toy Noddy written by Enid Blyton, in which I feature quite prominently. It should go without saying that I am not a toy myself. I am a brownie, also known as an urisk, ... Read More...
They don't make 'em like Robert Baden-Powell any more. In this week's cupboard is the scout founder, hero of Mafeking and embodiment of British Pluck... Rummaging on my bookshelves the other day I was delighted to find my somewhat battered copy of The Penguin Ronald Searle. It's a first edition from ... Read More...
Saturday was Owl Day at the Speedwell Children’s Centre so we took the girls along. Bob the owl man looked like an owl. That sort of thing happens far too often to ascribe it all to coincidence, doesn’t it? Ken Livingstone looks like a newt. Same with aptronyms. Strong and ... Read More...
Speak, memory! Frank reminisces about his own juvenilia... When I was about eleven years old, I devoted much of my time to nisbet spotting. For a child growing up on a featureless suburban council estate, it was perhaps an unusual pastime, and more unusual still that, so young, I was the ... Read More...
In October last year Frank Key posted about the wonderful Puffin book The Pirates' Tale by Janet Aitchison, aged five and a half. He said in the piece: Janet Aitchison will be middle-aged by now... We can only hope she gets in touch if she sees this. And lo! and behold, ... Read More...
But they will not go to bed. Long after lights out the pitter-patters and thump-thumps of strange games can be heard in their bedroom. Conspiratorial murmurings. Earnest discussions about meerkats. Then the whine of the gate and the pit-pats along the landing to the top of the stairs where they ... Read More...
This week, an eerie tale of astrology and tortoises... It came as something of a shock when I learned that my fate was written in the stars. I had no idea that every last particular of my life, from cradle to grave, was foretold in the barely visible movements, thousands and ... Read More...
