Latest posts
The importance of lists
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At a dinner table this evening we were talking about the importance of lists, but in a very specific context. Another guest had, like me, recently become an ‘orphan’ (that is, his sole surviving parent had passed away) and he had had to e...
Morels
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The dog was giving us a walk early this morning when, on an earthbank in a sunken lane, we came across the fellows in the picture. At first we weren’t sure, but a quick check on the internet told us we had stumbled on a late growth of morels. T...
Hares today…
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The hares out at Berthem have provided us with much amusement this spring. A group of three of them seem pretty much inseparable (they seem to have got the boxing out of the way now) and we see them every time we take this particular path.
The Great Degeneration
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This evening I read Niall Ferguson’s collection of 2012 Reith Lectures, published under the title The Great Degeneration How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. By coincidence, Ferguson is in the news for all the wrong reasons at the mo...
Open Doors Day 2013
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It was Open Doors Day in the European Union’s institutions all day today and once again the European Economic and Social Committee threw its doors open and welcomed European citizens into its Jacques Delors headquarters building – the hou...
Là où sont les oiseaux
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To Louvain-la-Neuve this evening, to the central library, for the vernissage of a friend’s latest book. Birds are never far away from Véronique Wautier’s poetry, and the title of her latest collection, Là où sont les...
Wiels/Auerbach/Bayrle
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To Wiels this afternoon to see the work of two artists; the American, Tauba Auerbach, and the German, Thomas Bayrle. The title of the Auerbach exhibition, Tetrachromat, refers to a theory that there may be a small percentage of people – for gen...
The Walkmen
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You know you have reached old-fartdom when you are invited to a rock concert by your N° 1 sprog and insist on turning up early for the warm-up act (she blames it on too much opera- and classical music-going where, it is true, the doors close on t...
Devil by the Tail
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At the writers’ workshop this evening I proudly showed off my latest acquisition, which is a 1947 novel, Devil by the Tail, by one Langston Moffett. Who might he be? No less than the son of prolific American journalist, playwright and...
The Pontfadog oak
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The Czech Republic has a wonderful tradition, dating from the nineteenth century, of taking its old trees very seriously (see this link, for example). There is a national list and the bigger and older trees are venerated. Things are done differently...
Some Westlakes
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I walked back from a Committee meeting with a Finnish member. Are you, he asked me, by any chance related to John Westlake, the chap who helped restore the Finnish constitution? I had to admit that I wasn’t, as far as I knew, related...
When Worlds Collide
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This evening, in the cultural centre of Rhode-St-Genèse, I was happy to participate in the culminating event of a longstanding cooperative venture bringing together the music of composer Nigel Clarke, the conducting of Luc Vertommen, the playi...
Pelléas et Mélisande
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To La Monnaie this evening for another portrayal of inexorable destiny – this time Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, with a libretto drawn by Debussy himself from Maurice Materlink’s symbolist play (about doomed l...
Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex
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To the Bozar this evening for Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (preceded by Apollo musagète), performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and the Monteverdi Choir, with Fanny Ardant as the narrator and all under the towering baton of John Eliot G...
The last chapter
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This evening, at the writers’ workshop, the last chapter of my magnum opus was presented and critiqued. It is such a relief to have got the whole of the thing down, albeit in raw form. Now the polishing begins in earnest. For, to be a little Ch...
O Lucky Man
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Tonight we watched Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 allegory on the UK’s capitalistic decline, O Lucky Man. I saw it when it first came out. Several aspects of the film made a deep impression upon me. A first was the way Malcolm McDowell...
To the Ardennes and back/Last Man Standing
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This morning I drove three young adventurers down to the deepest Ardennes, where they had to (hopefully) navigate their way across some interesting terrain as part of their Duke of Edinburgh award scheme. On the way there and back I ‘read&rsquo...
Bruges….
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Leaving aside all other aspects that will now be the subject of empassioned debate and media coverage for some time to come, who, speaking in Bruges on 20 September 1988, said the following? ‘The European Community is a practical mean...
Bernstein’s MASS
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This evening I caught up over a beer with my friend, Nigel Clarke, on an exciting music-and-words collaborative project that is nearing completion. There’ll be more about that on this blog when it is completed on 27 April. As always,...
Refugees – a European creation?
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BBC Radio 4′s Sunday programme this morning carried a report about the large-scale arrival of the Huguenots in England, particularly following the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, and about the economic and cultural consquences of such a large...
