Some light-hearted reflections on family life on this Feast Day of the Holy Family Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.Jessamyn WestThe family. We were a strange little band of characters ...
Britain has fallen strangely silent. Much of Europe, too. Travellers are stranded in alien places. We are bidden to abandon our festive journeys. The weather no longer conforms to expectation and our currency is well-diminished. Battered first by gale and flood, then paralysed in the grip of ice, many businesses have been dealt a final blow. The Shakespearian 'pathetic fallacy' has ...
Seasonal quotes with the first and last word from Charles Dickens.I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of ...
Further episode from this novelised history of celebrated Wreake Valley* chapel Just before Burns night, 1901, the frail old Empress shuddered, sighed, and was gone. She had ailed for many weeks following a punishing round that would have taxed a Sovereign half her age. At Christmas she retired to Osborne House on the Isle of ...
Episode from this novelised history of celebrated Wreake Valley* chapel It is a fact of life that, as the cobbler's own shoes are last to be mended and the lamplighter will live by the glow of a penny candle, so too the architect pays scant attention to the ramparts of his own hearth and home. John Henry Carte's plain brick villa was no ...
April is the cruellest month, the poet says. Green shoots and blossoms make a mockery of winter's torpid isolation - the sky's sheen like old ceramic crazed with sapless boughs - the ponds stagnant with rotting vegetation and hedgerows once decked with flowers and spangled fruit become naked tangled thorns, ...
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