The true story behind the famous poem by Robert Browning... Good evening. My name is Guus. If I may, I will tell you an anecdote. I am an ancient and somewhat crumbling gent, and it might be thought that I would have a veritable storehouse of anecdotage to draw upon, but ... Read More...
Funny
You will be familiar with the slow food movement, particularly if you are a Guardian reader living in an ecotown. Less high profile, but more amenable to the Dabbler demographic, is slow botany. So I am going to tell you all about it... Slow botany developed as a reaction against all ... Read More...
Last year I wrote a short biography of my childhood dog, Jason, and mentioned that, preposterously indulged, he had his own armchair in the front room. It was a pretty naff 1970s-coloured one left over from a previous suite, but this is what British people are like with their dogs. ... Read More...
The cruelties of Ancient Rome's circuses give Frank an idea for an exciting new movie starring Russell Crowe... One of the combat sports which thrilled the crowds in the circuses of Ancient Rome was the pitting of blind men against ostriches. A savage and ugly spectacle, no doubt, and one quite ... Read More...
Guns or butter? Butter or guns? It really is as simple as that. Which would you choose?... I have been watching, with something akin to hysterical overexcitement, reruns of the long-running television game show Guns Before Butter. It really is the most fantastic example of Bismarckian light entertainment ever devised. As ... Read More...
‘Let’s all get up and dance to a song that was a hit before your mother was born’, I suggested, and so we did, C and E and I, holding hands in a circle, to that one and Penny Lane and Baby, You’re a Rich Man. This is the sort ... Read More...
Polar bears might look cuddly but in fact they are very dangerous creatures. Here, Frank reveals a top tip for keeping safe when dealing with them... You might, in the unimaginably harsh gale-swept subzero temperatures in the frozen hell of the polar wastes, become peckish, particularly if your picnic hamper fell ... Read More...
Rita decides to take a leaf out of the book of NBC's Brian Williams and jazz up her anecdotes a bit. So here's the story of Rita's Life in America: the Dramatic Version (with fact checking supplied by a scrupulous research librarian)... On my first flight out of New York the plane made a ... Read More...
Like all businesses, bookselling would be fine if it wasn't for the customers. Here Steerforth sets out his Browser's Charter for people who would presume to enter a bookshop... When booksellers get together what do we talk about? Books? Yes, sometimes - I remember waking up on someone's floor after a ... Read More...
Frank unearths firsthand accounts of one of the most ridiculous paranormal experiments in the history of ghosthunting... Harry Price (1881-1948) was the most celebrated, and certainly the most energetic, English ghost-hunter of the last century. His name pops up somewhere in virtually every account of paranormal phenomena from the 1920s until ... Read More...
