06. May 2019
I ‘sailed’ with my family on a sixty-five-foot canal boat over Easter, starting out from Rugby. We’d done a couple of weekends in the past, but this was the first time I was brave enough to try a tunnel, the two km long Braunston Tunnel on the Grand Union. We motored into the maw and out of the reach of the spring sunshine at, I would conservatively say, about two knots. That’s still too fast a speed to enter the underworld, maybe two knots too fast, and it was so much darker than I’d...
22. February 2019
The truth is though, people do. In the same way we judge a plate of food before we taste it, a house by a front door, a company by a logo. Heck, when out walking my impeccably well-behaved Golden Doodle, Duffy (see The Dog Days of April) I’ll judge a dog from 80 yards by the tilt of its owner’s hat and reroute accordingly.
16. October 2018
I’m sleeping between two Springfield rifles. Each would be as long as I am were the bayonets fixed, but that’s not a good idea in a civil war dog tent, so called because when the soldiers first saw them they said they were only big enough for a dog. There’s two of us in here.
11. August 2018
Sometimes, on courses or at workshops, as an ice-breaker you’re asked to say something interesting about yourself. It’s a cruel torture for introverts like myself. My line, which is really about someone else, is that my grandfather was born one-hundred and one years before me, in 1864, around the time of the burning of Atlanta. In genealogy terms it’s a big head-start, two generations and I’m all the way back in the mid-Victorian era. An off-shoot of all this, an important one to me, is...
25. June 2018
We were in Cardiganshire, Ceredigion, over the end of May. ‘We’ being my wife, Sally, my youngest daughter, my dog and myself. We go to Wales most years. I grew up there and have a brother and sister who wisely never fought their way out. Why would you, with nook beaches backed by green hills and purple mountains, a sunset-sea to the west, fish and chips on the beach and a mandatory ice-cream every day.