by Valerie | Jun 19, 2018 | art, childhood, General interest, history, Italy, museums, people, travel
Some years ago I was having dinner in a handsome brick townhouse built in the early 1700s when a small soft piece of leather with a ribbon in a bow was passed around – a tiny child’s shoe. It had just been found under centuries-old plaster, recently removed to...
by Valerie | Jun 13, 2018 | childhood, General interest, history, museums, people, theatre, travel
If we define a city as a town with a cathedral, then Lichfield is a city. Its grubby cathedral standing proud in its walled precinct would ‘lose its face’, I was told, if cleaned because the local reddish stone crumbles under jets of water. Inside there was a buzz of...
by Valerie | May 29, 2018 | childhood, General interest, history
Here in Yorkshire white-flecked hedges mark out meadows, pastures and wheat fields. There are even mayflower woods clinging to hillsides. Where the hawthorn hasn’t been trimmed beside the roads, it grows into low trees waving bouquets of tiny-petalled flowers. When...
by Valerie | Mar 21, 2018 | art, childhood, General interest, history, people, Uncategorized
Daniel is eight years old. Sometimes when he wakes up early in the morning he goes into the garden to play his recorder, if it’s not too cold. If it is, he plays it softly in the kitchen. In March, he told me, he could be playing in the Albert Hall. ‘Who was Albert?’...
by Valerie | Oct 11, 2017 | 1950s, childhood, Fifties, General interest, history, poetry, reading groups, travel
Twenty-five years after coming to studynot far away at York University and publishing her bestseller, the Wild Swan was back again, standing in the pulpit of Beverley Minster to promote the same book in the Beverley Literature Festival. A quarter of a century has...
by Valerie | Jul 25, 2017 | childhood, General interest, history, people
There was some excitement in the class of seven-year-olds. We were to welcome two new members in our class. I didn’t think more about it until I passed two strangely-dressed women at the school gates; their hems too long and their faces deeply lined, they looked much...
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