Why leave the comfort of your home to go and see a film that has a storyline you are familiar with? I didn’t see Sully about the ‘plane that crash landed without loss of life on the Hudson River in 2009. I have been to Jackie, although the story is even more familiar.
Next month a memorial stone will be laid at the Shepherd’s Bush war memorial on Shepherd’s Bush Green in memory of First World War recipient of the Victoria Cross and native of Hammersmith, L/Sgt Frederick Palmer.
An article in The Spectator last week by Sinclair McKay sent me to a bookcase to pull this out. His piece was about Old Etonian, Nigel de Grey, who decoded the Zimmermann Telegram in 1917 with a Presbyterian pastor, the Rev William Montgomery.
At the beginning of Three Men in a Boat, published in 1889, the author and narrator (Jerome K Jerome) recounts that he has the symptoms of every disease from ague to zymosis – except housemaid’s knee. Perhaps he also had hypochondria – I know I do.
Happy new year from a wet, windswept London. It’s a time of resolutions and prognostications for 2017 in the media but here at Blog Bellew HQ we take a longer perspective.
There are some unfathomable mysteries in life. One is why John Betjeman called his teddy bear Archibald Ormsby-Gore. He took Archie with him to Oxford and Archie appears in Brideshead Revisited as Sebastian Flyte’s teddy, Aloysius.