We always managed a summer holiday during the six-week school breaks. Options were limited in the absence of surplus income and cheap flights, but we had always had a car. Initially, two black Jowetts, kept on the road by piecemeal engineering: I recall my father’s tie resuscitating the fan belt on one, and the strategic… Read More »
The phrase ‘café society’, the title of a book in press, has for me always pointed to a form of bounded sociability. It is a classic example of what Oldenburg calls a ‘third place’. Revisiting C Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, however, I discovered an alternative and quite different meaning. In the course of his… Read More »
It was the radio that entertained and diverted us in my early years. I overheard Grace Archer expire in the Archers. Wilfred Pickles’ Have a go’ was routine fare, a jar of homemade honey a likely prize for champion competitors. Later, Round the Horne was a favourite during Sunday lunches (followed by the unimaginably tedious… Read More »
I was at Worthing High School in my early teens when three of my grandparents died. My earliest recollections of both sets go back to Barnet in North London, but by the mid-1950s they had all migrated to Sussex, Ron’s parents to East Preston and Margaret’s to Rustington, then rural villages ten miles east of… Read More »
Worthing High School for boys was an awakening. I was randomly assigned to ‘Jutes’, one of four ‘houses’, the others being Angles, Saxons and Vikings. Grammar schools aped the independent sector. My first-form teacher, Mr (‘Horace’) Anderson, called me ‘Scambler’ while others were greeted by their first names. He took the trouble to tell me… Read More »
Quite aside from the challenge of re-accommodating to a tamer and routinized lifestyle, postwar returnees like my father, Ron, found themselves jobless and under-prepared for an uncertain future. The shipping industry in which he had been constructing a promising career had sunk, much of it literally. His choice of schoolteacher was impromptu and circumscribed. I… Read More »
Some papers have long periods of gestation as other projects sidle by. This belated new post yields more background material. It outlines two typologies: of (a) the material and (b) the social spaces of contemporary cafes in London and elsewhere. These set parameters for the ongoing discussion of virtual as well as actual relations. They… Read More »
It is UK-centric to date the outbreak of the second world war from September of 1939 since Nazi expansionism had already led to brutal suffering elsewhere in Europe, but it was in September that my father, Ron, left Brown, Jenkinson & Co and set about volunteering for the armed services. He had long worn spectacles… Read More »
Only a fully paid up academic could and would equivocate between two alternative and equally arcane subtitles: ‘sociological autobiography’ versus ‘autobiographical sociology’. In fact both make sense. The first and favoured option emphasises autobiography while suggesting a narrative of a life-course shaped by the confluence of time and place, a structured if not structurally determined… Read More »
In some cultures the activities of academics and intellectuals are regarded as mutually exclusive. To enjoy the comfort and security of a university position is tantamount to throwing in the intellectual towel. It sets parameters, binds and tames: the interests of the individual over time become reconciled to, or at least commensurate with, the bureaucratic… Read More »