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FIFTY years ago today I emerged onto this rock, screaming, farting and belching, looking like some hideous monster. The scene was re-enacted this morning as I was summoned into the day by two sons, two dogs and Brother Bertie’s bloody cat. If anything, the screaming has grown in volume over half a century. Half a […]

The last time King Richard III went to Leicester, his battered naked corpse was slung face down over a horse and he had a spear shoved up his bottom. Things, I would have thought, could only get better. Unfortunately… The poor King has now suffered a fate worse than horseless death on the butcher’s slab of […]

IT was all going reasonably well until I cut a finger, ramming the digit between a ladder and a rough stone wall. This was neither here nor there. Setbacks like this are commonplace in what passes for my life. Barely ten minutes elapse between each trivial disaster. Each of them amounts to nothing in or […]

IT was International Women’s Day yesterday. For me, the biggest impact was programming on Radio 3 that destroyed my Sunday listening amid a sonic tsunami of squawks, scrapes and bloody Bjork and her Emperor’s-new-clothes mews and howls. Modernist women composers everywhere. God, it was awful. The second biggest impact was flicking through the comments on […]

That’s what comes of living in the past. You forget the present, which is a mercy, and here we are a day late. Fascinating, though, how some preoccupations of the 17th and 18th centuries resembled our own: land acquisition, home improvement, debt. Of course, at a lower level survival was just about all you could […]