The view of the Pacific from our motel on this twelfth day of our drive across the USA was expansive but disappointing. There were palms and blood-red blossoms but the Ocean’s greyness could have been that of the Atlantic. A couple of Californians with long blond hair cycled past, he exclaiming to her: ‘Gee, your… Read More »
It was during our mid-term break that Annette and I had planned to drive our hired Buick to the Grand Canyon. We both taught our Emory classes in the morning of 6 March, 1998, filled up with bagels and by 2pm were leaving Atlanta and heading west on the I20. In driving rain we by-passed… Read More »
When old friend Terry Boswell became chair of the Department of Sociology at Emory University I suspect life for his colleagues took a turn for … well, whatever! Even his family and closest friends would admit that Terry was a bull in a china shop. He personally decided on the original artwork that should adorn… Read More »
The election of a Labour government in 1997 would not have impinged on my mother’s world in any meaningful way had she been alive to witness it. As it happened Margaret died a few months before the election, in December of 1996. ‘She wouldn’t hurt a fly’, Ron muttered as we drove in procession to… Read More »
The boy who was to give the phrase ‘war games’ a cruel new resonance was born on 6 May 1953, the second son of Leo and Hazel Blair. His family background was modest but aspiring. Fettes and Oxford delivered him to party politics via a brief flirtation with the rock industry. He married Cherie Booth… Read More »
Gray’s ‘Elegy’ above all else calls to mind the forgotten multitudes: Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear; Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air. And the very next verse, only the second I can quote… Read More »
Ron’s favourite poem was Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’. In his old, tattered edition of the Oxford Book of Verse his marker long rested here. From memory, the opening verse runs: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o‘er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way… Read More »
From cars to trains and the London underground. From the days of my first full-time job in central London – at St Bartholomew’s, a stone’s throw from St Paul’s tube – I have been a commuter. Many people hate commuting: my parents, Ron and Margaret, could not wait to put safe distance between home and… Read More »
As I commence this I have just bought a new car. Well, I say ‘new’. It is our first twenty-first century car, and I write at the fag end of 2014. We have actually never before this spent more than £1,400 on any vehicle. Cars are not what they were when my father, Ron, constructed… Read More »
As the summer of 1996 approached, American friends Dick Levinson and Mike McQuaide suggested that we consider visiting Atlanta for the Olympic Games. Mike, in particular, was adamant that we should. The subtext was his desire to exit Atlanta even as we would enter it. We could stay in his house and he in ours,… Read More »