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...
Life
In his early 20s Douglas Dalrymple followed a romantic notion to work in a salmon cannery in Alaska. It turned out to be tough. Here is his story... It’s a romantic notion. By way of explanation for a summer’s grubby employment on a steamer bound for Alaska in 1923, E.B. White ... Read More...
Jon Hotten on memory, dreams and cricket pitches... It's hard to write about a feeling as elusive as this one, yet it's that elusiveness that makes it both rare and worthwhile. It happened the other day, for the first time in a couple of years. I was driving through a town ... 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...
In today's dispatch, Rita recalls her very own courtroom drama... “Moon pie! Moon pie!” A young man’s voice shouted this nonsensical phrase over and over in the background of the 911 recording as the voice of an elderly woman calmly explained her emergency. Her back door had burst open and a ... Read More...
To Liverpool, a foreign island city-state that somehow got itself attached to mainland England. An ‘island’ because, as with the fauna of Galapagos, it has evolved in isolation into something very strange. Let’s start with the voices. It is widely believed that there is a ‘Scouse accent’. In fact there ... Read More...
In this dispatch, Rita explains how the 19th Century poet was responsible for the whole course of her life... If there were one person I could hold responsible for the twist of fate that sent me to live in America, it would have to be Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yes, the Jesuit ... Read More...
Il pleut. I must resort to French; ‘it is raining’ is too drably familiar to describe February’s pluvial onslaught. I need words of one syllable; words that can be spat; words at one remove, sufficiently alien for the deluge that has amphibianised our villages, turned our lowlands into swamplands and ... Read More...
Waking before dawn I first reached for my phone to check on England’s latest reassuringly routine cricket thrashing by Australia, then groaned out of bed to descend and in the kitchen force tea and toast into unwelcoming guts. Twice since the last diary I have had long work days in ... Read More...
‘One adult for The Hobbit in 3D, please,” I said, thus setting the bar pretty high for the Saddest Thing Uttered in 2014 contest. It can’t be helped: a residue of youthful Tolkein geekdom means that a part of me will always yearn for the world of dragons and pointy-eared ... Read More...
