Category: Family

A Tale of Two Town Halls

This magnificent building was completed in 1897. It cost £28,000; considered extravagant by its opponents. It fronted onto Brook Green Road and Hammersmith Broadway. It was Hammersmith Town Hall. It was designed in the ornate Italian manner, a style that had been popular for metropolitan municipal architecture since at least the 1860s but which was… Continue reading A Tale of Two Town Halls

Peace for Our Time

Star Wars A Galactic Empire stormtrooper stands guard on the balcony of a house in Barnes overlooking the towpath. He has a festive crown this year. (George Lucas specified that there are no women in the Stormtrooper Corps.) Star Wars was released more the forty years ago – 1977 – and has shaped our lives.… Continue reading Peace for Our Time

Hop, Skip and Jump

The seasons and the weather change; there’re always new things to see and the river has many moods. Now I talk, sometimes, to other dog owners. Recently I met a Dutch Shepherd puppy with his Swedish/Japanese owners. Overhearing other towpath walkers, I seldom hear English. London, at its best, is a cosmopolitan, civilised place to… Continue reading Hop, Skip and Jump

Ritz Crackers

Christmas Cracker This poem about Anthony Blunt, would have delighted John Julius Norwich; it surely would have been in his Christmas Cracker. Who’d have guessed it? Blunt a traitor And a homosexualist, Carrying on with tar and waiter – There’s a sight I’m glad I missed. It would earn its place because it comes from Harvest… Continue reading Ritz Crackers

Arms and the Man

Arma virumque cano  (of arms and the man I sing) as Virgil puts it so succinctly in the Aeneid. A reader tells me a schoolboy hazarded this translation: “I sing of arms, men and dogs, sir”. I cannot sing but I do want to flaunt my Arms. The late Sir Iain Moncreiffe in Simple Heraldry, Cheerfully… Continue reading Arms and the Man

LRRP – pronounced lurp

In the late 1970s I was a Trooper in the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC). One summer I was sent to a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) school in the Black Forest.

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On Reconnaissance

It is May 2018. Six serving British soldiers are in the Republic of Ireland with weapons and live ammunition. This is not the beginning of a new career for me as a thriller writer. This is true.

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End of an Era

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the first edition of The New Peerage published in 1769 by a bookseller and stationer, John Almon. He passed on the editorship to one of his assistants and, perhaps unfairly, it became known as Debrett’s after its second editor, John Debrett.

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