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Tuesday, 18 February 2020

Roll up, roll up and thrill to the spectacle of Hemingway academics — possibly (be careful, dear boy) — disappearing up their own arses. Moral of the tale: a little exegesis goes a very long way indeed

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Well, that’s silly: I decided that my main blog was too public for me to record more private things, so I started this one. But I made the m...
Sunday, 16 February 2020

A little treat (to keep the pot boiling and to cover my arse)

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I’ve been busy with a lot of reading to get this Hemingway bollocks finished — I don’t want to start anything else until I do or it will fa...
Saturday, 8 February 2020

To be blunt, I'm a bit put out. I don't do this for fun, you know, or rarely. OK, sometimes, but just sometimes . . . OK, quite often, but don’t take me for granted. Roll up, roll up and get your friends to do the same

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Frankly, I’m disappointed. OK, it might well be my fault for not being more interesting and topical — what’s ‘topical’ about posting black...
Thursday, 23 January 2020

Some pictures of East Frisia/Ostfriesland

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Thought I might show some piccies I took two days ago. I’ve been dicking around with them to make them look old, but as I say they were actu...
Tuesday, 14 January 2020

Do we actually need writers? And here’s the question: did Wimsatt and Beardsley, and Roland Barthes (who has to be French with a name like that) work as hard was Ernest Miller Hemingway? I bet they did. And I bet they didn’t bullshit quite as much, either

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A few years ago, the following occurred to me (and I shall stick to the art of writing rather than any other art to try to avoid muddying th...
Saturday, 11 January 2020

Building guitars in the back of beyond, in Esterwegen (a nice spot now, but not so nice for some in 1933)

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Heinitzpolder, East Frisia, Germany Well, now settled in for what looks like it will be a month. Simple routine: sleep until whenever, pot...
Monday, 6 January 2020

Germany here I come (as, I hope, is the conclusion of this bloody project of mine)

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Bodmin to London train: Off on my travels again, this time to the Fatherland for a spot of nominal housesitting for my sister. She and my ...
Saturday, 28 December 2019

You ain’t seen nothing yet, sunshine, so do me a favour and fuck nostalgia

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I’ve not posted here for a while and feel my crown slipping, so I thought I might add a few anecdotes about newspapers and folk I have known...
Wednesday, 11 December 2019

Does Britain want to die of liver cancer or bowel cancer? Neither, as it happens, but that is our choice tomorrow when we go to the polls

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It will be of little interest to anyone living outside the Western Hemisphere because many living there have other concerns (and however muc...
Friday, 6 December 2019

Letter (email) to my daughter

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By chance, I came across this, a ‘letter’ (actually an email) to my daughter when she was at the end of her first year at university and unh...