Category: Family

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I took some well-intentioned advice after I bought bird feeders nearly two years ago, namely to buy food by the sackful. Accordingly I bought two paper sacks of bird seed from the RSPB.

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I Never Met …

I never met Winston Churchill or Princess Margaret. My brother marched behind Churchill’s coffin when he was a young officer in the Irish Guards and Uncle George (aka Sir George Bellew) helped arrange the elaborate funeral.

The Ghastly Affair

Rosherville Gardens was a seventeen acre site on the Thames not far from Gravesend in Kent. It opened in 1837 to provide a day out for Londoners, consisting of pleasure gardens adorned with statues, follies and more than 8,000 specimen trees. Visitors came by paddle-steamer and new attractions were added including bands, jugglers, sword swallowers,… Continue reading The Ghastly Affair

The Ginger Man

“When you don’t have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it’s sex. When you have both it’s health.” That’s from The Ginger Man by JP Donleavy. He served in the US navy in WWII and jumped ship to go to Trinity College Dublin in 1946. Like Evelyn Waugh he didn’t get… Continue reading The Ginger Man

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Popcorn

Experiments in psychology are thought-provoking. The University of South California did one using popcorn. They gave cinema audiences free popcorn and monitored how much they ate. Then they gave a similar group free popcorn but with the proviso that they had to eat with their non-dominant hand.

School Dinners

I’m not one for school reunions. At least ten years ago there was a drinks party in London for all the boys in “my” year at Eton. It was excruciating as the few I recognised I wasn’t especially keen on and otherwise it was a sea of strange faces. I ended up talking to the… Continue reading School Dinners

A Hanging Offence

More than fifty years ago my brother stole this from, well you can guess where. He was in the habit of taking a room at the Intercontinental Hotel in the afternoons to catch up on some sleep after the revelry at Hunt Balls in Horse Show week. 

A Special Bond

I hadn’t been to the Public Record Office in Kew since 1999 and dug out my Reader’s Ticket to make a return visit. Luckily I checked to see if anything had changed.

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Bryan Bertram Bellew

I have re-read my grandfather’s obituary, published in The Irish Times.

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Risotto & Ratio

My great-great-great-great grandfather is a distinguished Spanish mathematician and scientist. It would be repetitious to write about him as older readers will remember the story from a September 2015 post, A Spy in the Family.