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The Rolling Stones, O2 Arena, 25 November 2012
Ah, the Stones. Unquestionably the greatest rock’n’roll band of all time. No-one else can match them for authenticity, for appetite, for longevity, most of all for excitement.
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Basil Murray Savage 1910-1994
You don’t usually remember much about the kids in the year above you at school: any interaction tends to be fleeting, unless, for example, you’re good enough to play in the school football team a year early. But I remember Andrew Skinner, or should I say, Skinner! because that was…
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Paddington Bear and the Cholesterol Bath
Come back in a couple of months and you’ll find me sporting whiskers and a white napkin while a rosy-cheeked maid serves me my kippers, eggs and tomatoes under a silver cloche, as my butler hands me a freshly ironed copy of The Times, from which I emerge occasionally to…
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Teacher’s Pet
I had already embarked on a lifetime journey of pedantry, and sensed that an injustice had been done. But I didn’t get involved: I was Mr Savage’s favourite, and there was no reason to put that at risk.
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David Bowie, Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park, 24 December 1972
Bowie prowled the stage screaming “Gimme your hands…cause you’re wonderful” – written for this very purpose – reaching out his healing hands to fans like the god he had become that night.
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David Gauke: My Part in Not Preventing His Downfall
Before I had reached the end of the driveway the door opened and a man in his seventies shouted after me “He’s a traitor!” It seemed that not all voters had embraced Gauke’s idea of a more thoughtful and respectful style of politics. I was reluctant to engage: I was…
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Night visits
I’m staying in a large house, York maybe, perhaps I own it, and there’s a small hatch leading off a landing to a suite of larger rooms which are nicer but neglected, and I wonder, am I allowed to go there and why don’t I use them more often
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Nain
I am lucky to remember all four of our grandparents, although Nain – Maggie as she was known – is the one I remember least well, as she died when I was seven.
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elementary
if I could give a longer list of elements I surely would, of others that I may have missed no news has come to chorleywood
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Please don’t
Please don’t wave the Union Flag around as if you own it, or as if you speak for everyone in the UK. It is the flag of a country whose people have many different opinions.
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Concerning inconsistency in the London and Boston Marathon qualifying times
Welcome to the unforgiving world of athletics age grading.
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king commode and his expanding rubber band, Watford Grammar School for Boys – 1st April 1969
I had no yardstick by which to measure the quality of the live music I heard that night, fifty years ago. But to my impressionable young ears, it was the best thing, ever. Thank you guys.
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Dr Feelgood, Cambridge Corn Exchange – 25 September 1976
…they were prophets come to lead us to a better future, or a better past, and I reached for them, a parched wanderer at an oasis.
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Everly Brothers, Royal Albert Hall – Thursday 22 September 1983
“Do you think they’ll get it?” asked the brothers. The reply came back from their British hosts “Are you nuts? They’ll go crazy!”
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Led Zeppelin, Empire Pool, Wembley – 21 November 1971
It was electrifying: I had never heard anything like it, and somehow by the end of their first song tears had welled up from sheer excitement and joy.
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The Golden Tree of St Francis
A woman was screaming. Pitched halfway between fear and anger, loud and sustained. An adult woman, Dan thought, yet there was a note of petulance, the suggestion of a toddler tantrum.
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run places
in my run places I’m lost in effort and pass through in seconds but later picture myself there and yearn to be back and when I cannot visit them I ache to be there
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The Bream and the Mule
At this point Rob perhaps sensed I was getting a little overwrought, and suggested, probably by way of distraction, that I might enjoy trying to incorporate the words on the board into a poem.
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