Blog - People In Mind
The Sport of Kings
The races are back! Yorkshire has so many racecourses that I have lost count – York, Ripon, Richmond, Doncaster, and Beverley. Maybe others. A fine day, brisk breeze and the horse boxes are lining the road outside the Beverley course. There are ugly dogs, fortunately...
Sorting Out
Sorting, an act of destruction of past memories, or a clearing of debris from treasures hidden beneath? Meaningful books emerge to make the act of rejection, of discarding, of throwing away part of one’s past unbearable. Almost like an injury to one’s past...
Phobias and Fears
As a child, my biggest treat was to go to Chessington Zoo. I would look at the sky to see whether there was enough blue to make a pair of sailor’s trousers. If there was, we would board a train and then a bus to convey us to the promised treat. What was it that...
Hurly-Burly
A medley of tinny sounds. A babble of voices interspersed by screams of delight. Smells stinging one’s nostrils sweetly. Easter. The pier has sprung into life. The one at Hastings is new. The old one caught fire and burnt down. There is something special about a...
The Cruellest Month
T S Eliot wrote in his poem The Wasteland ‘April is the cruellest month…’ Trees and plants burst into sharp green leaves and the first flowers appear. Intermittent sunlight; hailstorms and rainbows – a month of contrasts. Not that long ago I visited a friend. His...
A Brush with History
EM Forster Isaiah Berlin I was playing 'ducks and drakes' on our local pond with two school friends when I felt a shiver of apprehension. A tall man appeared suddenly and stood silently watching us. He didn't even greet us, just stood there and watched. I felt uneasy,...
Sunlit Uplands
Ever since I was a student, I have had recourse to the same image of hope. Everyone now must be dreaming of somewhere beyond the horizon where life as we once knew it can return – with some gentle tinkering carried out by our imagination in the meanwhile. Mine is in...
Snowdrops
Every year, whatever the weather, I go on a snowdrop walk. It is the most memorable winter one, as if there has been a woodland wedding with white confetti scattered willy-nilly under the trees, but they are delicate white petals shimmering like bells stroked by a...
Prelapsarian Truths
Herculaneum I read somewhere that history begins fifty years ago and progresses backwards as far as there are written records. Before that, it is archaeology – stones and bones. When I was told that Mary Beard has been examining the remains left in Roman latrines, I...
Unbelievable
I’m perplexed. Not too many years ago it would have been thought unbelievable that the so-called ‘heart of modern democracy’ – the capitol building at the end of the Mall in Washington in the state of Columbia, U.S.A. - could be assaulted by a horde of irate people...
Status
There is a strange stillness before the first frost dusts the mown grass white. In time past, before central heating, there was surprise and delight when one threw back the eiderdown into the freezing morning to find frost had painted delicate, spidery leaf patterns...
Worthy
This is the word that immediately springs to mind to describe Joe Biden, the next president of the USA. Worthy. Should I feel a tinge of guilt as well as relief? I should perhaps be more enthusiastic. Well, there is the question of age, and the irritating sequence of...
Ballast
Some years ago in Norfolk, I wandered through the ‘piano nobile’ of Houghton Hall, built by the first prime minister of England, Robert Walpole, my thoughts warmed by the vibrant hue of mahogany furniture that soon was to become firmly out of fashion. The golden-toned...
Mellow Fruitfulness
The consolation of an autumn prelude to winter is the return to a poem I can never forget since I chanced upon it as a teenager. ‘Season of mellow fruitfulness Close bosom-friend of the retiring sun…’ Keats, so young, so unaware that his life would be tragically...
Heralding Autumn
The autumn equinox approaches the northern hemisphere with turbulence heralding winter. Now, as when I was a student returning from a summer to practise my tenuous knowledge of French, or Spanish or Italian, the travellers might still crowd the decks of cross-channel...
Drizzle
High up on my list of pleasurable experiences is one involving drizzle or light rain. An ideal bedroom is one right under the roof so one might have the lullaby of the patter of rain on the roof tiles or slates. It provides the thin curtain outside the window as I...
Heath
Four days after I left hospital, I was walking along a hilltop in North Yorkshire in search of the last of the purple carpet of heather before it fades into autumn which has now officially begun. It was strangely silent without a living soul in sight. I expected to...
Random Thoughts that might be Dangerous
Disturbing statistics show that more members of minority ethnic groups, or BAME, are dying of Covid-19. As my hospital experiences showed, this is hardly surprising, as so many of them are carrying out the essential frontline duties caring for patients in hospitals...
Fitness
Having been sensitively and professionally tended by a massively overweight nurse in hospital, I am struggling to understand why the efforts, that seem to come in waves, to reduce obesity in Britain are so unsuccessful. For my nurse practitioner cousin, it is simply a...
Concatenation
Falling water, be it from craggy over-hanging rocks or a dam or in a canal as one water level adjusts to another – all are spectacles to watch with a strange kind of fascination. A lavatory cistern is so banal and so powerful in its potential for destruction. A...
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