Webcharms

Today was the sixtieth anniversary of one of the defining smogs of London. It started on 5 th December 1952 and continued for four days, bringing death it is said to some 4,000 people. A ‘smog’, for those unfamiliar with the word, is a combination of smoke and fog that, in urban areas, can reduce visibility almost to nothing while being very bad for the lungs due to the chemicals trapped in the water vapour. They were known in London as ‘pea soupers’, reflecting the vaguely greenish yellow colour of the smoke-filled vapour. At the time of the ’52 smog we were living at Bush Barn Farm in Robertsbridge and, as I would have been 14, I must have been at Lancing College. However, I remembered earlier smogs when we were still at the Green Walk in Chingford, north London, particularly one occasion when I walked with my father into a murky, after dark Ridgeway as far as the bus stop, unable to see more than a few feet in front of us Cities, of course, burnt a vast amount of coal. On journeys

We had several large slices of cold roast lamb which I wanted to use for shepherd’s pie. Rather than the traditional sweet/sharp enhancements like tomato, wine or Worcestershire sauce I decided to add some red currant juice. I found a plastic box of red currants on the fruit shelves of Sainsburys supermarket in St. Leonards. Round, red, translucent pearls with shining skins each with a small withered crown of calyx leaves at their south pole. Each fruit was attached by a short stalk to a central string that had once hung enticingly from a branch of a carefully tended bush. One of my long-held ambitions has been to grow a plant as a cordon on a shady north wall where the fruit can ripen slowly protected by some sort of cover from marauding birds. For my shepherd’s pie I took about one third of the currants and squashed the juice out into my meat and vegetable mix by squeezing and scraping them through a fine mesh steel sieve with a metal spoon. The following day I used the rest of the f

I am finding an increasing number of art manifestations around Hastings, perhaps following the St. Leonards mural by Banksy on a wall below the promenade. First there was this little bird on a great splash of white paint looking as though it was leaping from a nest formed by an ivy-leaved toadflax plant in Waterworks Road. Then I found this strange creature chalked on the pavement in Mann Street.  Is it a monster or a millipede or a fish bone?  Thirdly I came across this cluster of pink blackberries just outside the pedestrian tunnel leading from Bethune Way to the Queens Road area.  They have been carefully spray painted so that none of the colour appears on nearby stems and leaves - a charming and ephemeral manifestation.  Googling 'pink blackberries' produces, of course, endless web sites on Blackberry smartphones and little else.

On Friday, 15 th June, our granddaughter Samantha was looking through some store boxes for documents my wife was after, when she came across and old photograph, loose, by itself. It was of Alice Holroyd, the unmarried sister of my maternal grandmother Emily Butler and therefore my great aunt and our children’s great great aunt. She was born, I think, in the Bethnal Green area of London, though the surname has a Yorkshire origin and there was still some recollection of these northern roots when I was a child. One claim was that the family had a blood link to George Stephenson, the Northumbrian engineer who made the first public railway in the world to use steam locomotives, a line inaugurated in 1825. Alice Holroyd, Auntie Alice as I knew her, spent her working life as a primary school teacher in West Ham, East London having trained at Goldsmiths College in Lewisham. She often used to visit us at 5 The Green Walk in North Chingford on the north eastern outskirts of London. This was

Reading Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls , I came across this well-known passage: Once, long ago, in the years of my youth, in those beautiful years that rolled so swiftly, I was full of joy, charmed when I arrived for the first time in an unknown place; it might be a farm, a poor little district town, a large village, a small settlement: my eager, childish eyes always found there many interesting objects. Every building, everything that showed an individual touch, enchanted my mind, and left a vivid impression.   The author then goes on to describe such a village in great detail. I had to take our daughter to the dentist in the nearby town of Battle today and, waiting for her return and inspired by Gogol I wrote the following: Battle.  Mount Street car park . The whole area was dry, in the depths of a March drought and the sunlight had a peculiar, unseasonal intensity.  It made strong contrasts on the walls of the 1990s sheltered homes with their mixture of rufous and sardine-c

In the distance I can often see mountain ranges The landscape of the future Unlike the now and the past it is not greenish brown But pale, translucent mauves and pinks Like a shoal of frozen crystalline jellyfish