Saint Leodegar

The St Leger has been run on Town Moor outside Doncaster since 1776, or thereabouts. It’s the oldest of the Classics run over a mile, six furlongs and 132 yards in September.

The Damnation of Faust

La Damnation de Faust is a problem opera. The problem is that it’s not an opera.

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Finding Harmony

I went back to Chalfont St Giles on Wednesday evening. My last visit was on a hot April day in 2018. This time my journey did not go to plan.

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Ending Up

Kingsley Amis peaked early with Lucky Jim, published in 1954 when he was 32. He never wrote anything remotely as good and it beats me how Ending Up got nominated for the Booker Prize. I suppose the judges warmed to it as it’s only 113 pages.

When Bali Met Bertie

I took Bali along the towpath to Richmond yesterday morning while Robert kept an eye on Bertie. It was high tide so not much avian activity on the foreshore.

Tarantino’s 9th

Regrettably I was the only one on the oil futures desk who knew why Catholic parts of Europe had a holiday on 15th August; the Feast of the Assumption. In our increasingly secular society this year this Holy Day assumes significance for cineastes too.

Rigaud and Handel

In yesterday’s post we were in the Private Chapel of St James at Great Packington and found no sculpture worth mentioning. Actually there are two recumbent plaster images succinctly dismissed by Pevsner as “rather bad”.

The Private Chapel of St James

It’s lunchtime on James Miller’s sculpture tour in Warwickshire and Northants. (Why do some English counties have an abbreviation and others don’t? It is not the case in Ireland.) Cars roll onto the greensward outside the Private Chapel of St James at Great Packington. Following instructions we park in a huge circle, car bonnets facing… Continue reading The Private Chapel of St James

The Beagle Has Landed

Not all the news is bad. There was an item in The Guardian this week noting that the urban bird population is increasing and is more diverse because of the popularity of bird feeders charged with nutritious and tempting food.