2389 days ago
170 years ago my Church of Ireland forebears were sitting happily at Edenmoor, a country house in Donegal with bellies full while in the fields outside the poor catholics starved. Actually Donegal got off relatively lightly with its population falling by less than 20%. In Clare or Mayo the events of the Irish famine were truly terrible. A million Irish folks died and the same number emigrated. There is little doubt that British Corn Laws and the exploitative nature of the Landlord tenant relationship added to the woes of the potato blight. We Brits & the Cochranes of Ballybofey and their ilk have a good deal to answer for.
2481 days ago
It is the sort of conversation I only really have with my father. We sit here tonight in Shipston. With the Mrs having taken Joshua back to Bristol, I am with the old man for a couple of days. We are killing time ahead of the BBC news. I write the odd article, he reviews old family papers, something that is the focus of his life these days. Have I discussed the Ightham murder of 1908 on these pages? No? Well, maybe another time.
2838 days ago
I was sitting on the train the other day and on the other side of the carriage a couple of seats away and facing me was a rather foxy woman of perhaps 45 years. She sat next to a lad who was perhaps 25 and looked sufficiently like the woman that I am confident that he was her son, rather than her young lover. They spoke in French and she was reading a booklet in English with a title something like "50 ways to look better naked". I could see enough to notice that it contained pictures although I am too short sighted to see what the pictures were.
