Words and Music

In 1966, I was fourteen, and in third year at secondary school. I was quite good at English, but I can’t say I much enjoyed it. Like all of the other subjects on the curriculum, for the majority of the teachers, it was a case of “This is what you have to do to pass

Good byes, Good pies!

Around twenty years ago, we first visited Cape Cod in Massachusetts. With its beaches and history, it is a prime place for a family holiday, especially if relaxation is high on your agenda. On our first visit we stayed in the charming town of Falmouth, but when we returned two years later, we chose the

How did that happen?

For cricket fans of a certain age, it can feel  that the game has been walking briskly away from us in the past decade. Test cricket suffers from players more familiar with the shortened game,  additional  formats are created, based on a presumed lack of attention span on the part of players and spectators, and

Going round the back

“Don’t use the front door, come round the side. Keep those mucky shoes off my good carpets!” It was an unusual National Trust welcome, but it brought back distant memories of everyday life in the sixties, when  money was scarce, and carpets expensive, and only to be cleaned by the application of elbow grease. Less

LOOKING BACK

For my generation, as expected, the release of Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” trilogy, reworked from the  Beatles’ “Let it Be” footage, has been emotional. And why not – as it harks back to an important element of our childhood days? However, the films have also served as a reminder of the way we were. I

A cold wind in November

A cricket field in November can be a discomforting place. The grass is too long, the square indistinguishable, and the sightscreens flat and covered against the elements. Leaves are swept by the winter wind, hither and yon, as if not knowing where to go in all those wide spaces. That same wind dulls the echoes

A SADLY SMOKE FREE ZONE

The cricket ground at Arboretum Road has seen many notable Sunday fixtures over the decades, including a double century from future Aussie captain, Kim Hughes, when playing for Greyhounds against Holy Cross, but seldom has a game been as stirring as Sunday’s memorial game for Holy Cross stalwart, Colin McGill, who died last year after

A Decent Bloke

They should have written a novel about him. Brian Palmer, who died last week, was my cricketing team mate at Holy Cross Academicals for over two decades and was, in so many ways, a unique character. For those who played against him he was instantly unforgettable – battered panama hat, baggy Aran sweater almost to

Dreams destroyed, memories mangled

I rarely write television reviews, though as a teacher of English, I theoretically have the ability. However, as Clive James demonstrated so long ago in the Observer, and as Aidan Smith shows in his contemporary pieces in The Scotsman, there is a particular skill to deconstructing a television programme while writing about it in an

No Ordinary Man

Father Hugh Purcell, who has died, started his working career as a technician in the Edinburgh Blood Transfusion Centre. It was an apposite position, because, when he later  became a priest, he would provide life saving transfusions of Faith for many who were in danger of losing their beliefs. I first became aware of Hugh