The Oldie has an excellent column: Not Many Dead (Important Stories You May Have Missed). The December issue, beats me why it’s published in November unless it’s so subscribers in far-flung outposts receive a copy in a sweaty, cleft stick in time for Christmas, has two submissions.
It is April 2015, so pre-blog, I take a train to Berwick-on-Tweed to meet friends who have driven from East Anglia. So you are in the picture, as the army is fond of saying, we plan to walk down the coast to Alnwick.
My bubble is very comfy. Robert and I have not lost our jobs because we didn’t have any and our income has not been reduced. Most people are not so fortunate.
“Vote early, vote often” is ascribed to corrupt elections in Chicago. In the UK the only way to vote early is by using a postal vote, a privilege much abused by Matron in old folks’ homes.
My Jameson grandmother hoped that I would become a sportsman like her brother, Tommy Jameson. She gave me a Squash racquet and Fives gloves but, until I discovered Backgammon, competitive sports were not my forte – probably because I was always the loser.
“We cannot tell from day to day what may come. This is no ordinary time. No time for weighing anything except what we can do best for the country as a whole, and that responsibility rests on each and every one of us as individuals.”
Reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s magisterial (no other word could do it justice) No Ordinary Time, I am struck by the similarities and differences between Franklin and Winston during the war.