Nige on a legendary hippie and his surprising family connection... One of the more surprising facts about John Snagge, the old-school BBC radio announcer and boat race commentator ('I can't see who's in the lead, but it's either Oxford or Cambridge') is that he was the guardian of a legendary figure of ... Read More...
Oddities
Anyone who has suffered writer's block might take consolation from the life of John Ferrar Holms. Jonathan Law introduces perhaps the least productive 'writer' in the English language... A while ago on The Dabbler , Mark Pack wrote feelingly about the miseries of writers’ block – of self-doubt, procrastination, and hours spent ... Read More...
How technology and radical new forms of communication are changing the way the General Election campaign is fought... With less than a week to go before polling day, and the parties still neck and neck, only one thing can be said with certainty. This is the first electoral campaign where the battle ... Read More...
When Steerforth came across the strange-looking autobiography by one Baroness Von Bülop, he was intrigued - especially as she seemed to have enlisted the celebrated photographer Cecil Beaton... One stormy afternoon, I came across an illustrated 1939 autobiography called 'My Royal Past', by Baroness Von Bülop: It didn't look terribly inspiring, but then I noticed ... Read More...
What do the unsettling and astonishing multi-generational migratory habits of the monarch butterfly tell us about humans?... The multiple life stages of butterflies were strangely upsetting to me as a boy. Their transformations were supposed to inspire wonder, and the eruption of the adult butterfly from the pupa, I was told, ... Read More...
From Wordsworth to Auden, a surprising number of famous poems have been blighted - or sometimes, improved - by printing errors, as Jonathan Law reveals... In a post a while back Frank Key gave us his startling revisionist take on a well-known poem by Sylvia Plath: In her mad poem ‘Daddy’, Sylvia Plath makes ... Read More...
How might history have turned out if Skippy the Bush Kangaroo had been called 'Googie' instead, asks Frank urgently.... Skippy The Bush Kangaroo might so easily have been called Googie. The eponymous marsupial heroine of the Australian television series, which ran from 1966 to 1968 and is still shown regularly on ... Read More...
The sight of escaping llamas in Arizona reminds Rita of a time when she discovered a slice of English village pathos in America... The llamas made a break for freedom. And freedom-loving Americans everywhere were captivated by the live video feed from suddenly diverted traffic helicopters. It was the most exiting ... Read More...
Having the house to myself and thinking to effect an overdue reconciliation with combative hack bombshell Pippa Tregaskis after that unpleasantness last June, I tentatively invited her to come over for an afternoon tipple and some audio entertainment on my newly rigged-up hand-operated copper-plated original Blötzmann Mk III turntable, which ... Read More...
Frank busts some of the myths surrounding Lothar Preen's storied Four Last Songs... Tra La La, The Drainage Ditch is one of the Four Last Songs by elegantly-bouffanted sociopath Lothar Preen [above]. It is, for the majority of critics, the best of the quartet, a brain-numbing racket of melodic astringency with ... Read More...
