Somewhen in the 1970s we stopped eating things that our parents ate of frugal necessity: my mom and dad were mid-teens, then young adults, in the UK during the war years; my own childhood diet included many wartime recipes until their death knell was sounded by the beep of the microwave oven and convenience.

In England, a country which imported sixty per cent of its food in 1939, rationing was rapidly introduced and lasted in some forms until the mid-fifties. There were some…

Rachel called the lamb 'Menachim' (she told me when she was much older) because its fleece was as white as her grandfather's hair but because of the way she said it, or perhaps did not say it, I figured it was just because Menachim was an utterly gentle man. Moshe, Menachim's second son, who was a paratrooper and had a proudly fierce and utterly ungentle disposition, found the whole business highly offensive:

"Safta," he would complain to Menachim's mother, "how can you allow Ruchie…

The murder of Proudy Hoare was only half the most exciting thing to happen at The Daffodil Bar that summer, and it wasn't that the slaying itself was a considerable coup de théâtre (which it was), or that the ex-sanguinary effects  weren't both colorful and projective (which they were)—it was just such a bloody marvel the whole thing might have been orchestrated by a Broadway impressario.

"Effin' hell," shouted Pickle (he was visiting London on…

Curt Broger joined the union when he was 21, which was a big deal because a union job meant his hourly wage was several times the average in that town for what was, by pretty much anyone's standard, unskilled work;  by the time he was twenty-three he had grown a beard, a T-shirt-banded gut and wore a Local-71 overjacket with the demeanor of a man who didn't give a damn for a world dressed otherwise. So that morning after he dropped its tiny hex screw, he didn't even think about options but…

It was one those things that must have seemed such a good idea at the time, when it sat before the Mayor, all precisely engineered in card and plastic — why there were even bobbly cotton-bud trees in improbable shades of green and nuclear family stick figures in summer pastels mingling amongst, a fantasy parodied by the hopefully anxious property developer and his architects mingling at the Mayor's nether regions.



"Magnificent," Mister Mayor murmurred; of…

* Poll shows Romney 3rd Best President ever

* Sound of Music remake, Lohan stars

* China to Japan: keep your @#!*! islands

* Pastor Snoop Dog hosts Texas megachurch pray-in

* Donald Rumsfeld admits: I got it all wrong

* Particle scientists: all now known, no more funding needed

Leaving aside for the moment the idea that he should do it lying on the floor because every thing is more fun that way,  Joe does his letters in an odd way: he sits at the table and then he takes a sheet of paper, lays it flat and pushes a book up against its left edge, a table mat (which is made of felt and one of those easy things to steal so he'll chase me into the bedroom and that big old bouncy bed!) against the other, then he rolls up the sleeve of his right arm and…

...ripples of the Somme, he wrote, and I imagine the young soldier laying down his book, grass-stalk in mouth, to watch the hospital barge drift by in the reddening varnished sunlight. Perhaps that afternoon he was on leave, a few still hours respite from the cacophony of Flanders.

There is something fierce…

Lord of The Rings - The Inkling Conception

Good Ship Lollipop - The Ringlets Perversity

Apocalypse Now - The Riverine Brutality

Little Shop of Horrors - The Flower Malice

Alien - The Extestine Outburst

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe…

Honeysuckle'd sunken lane, happy hearts a'pother

Sneezy high green rustle-by, dares don't tell our mother

Flitter-hums hum-bustle by, sunlit globes of cuckoo spit

Thorn-bark scrapes  all dusty dry, clamber, fall, and itchy sit

Such hazy day and honey heat, reach weary for another

Nip the flower, suck the juice, just bring one home to mother

Mom, come right now !

Please tell me how

next to my bacon

(That I saw you making)

Something's moving, lurking,

Eight wriggling jerking

Horrid hairy spider legs,

Right here in my scrambled eggs ?

Eeeeeh, mom, it's not eight,

There's only seven on my plate.

Yuck, Mom, it isn't funny.

I swallowed one. It's in my…

He could lie with facility, on his feet and ready to leap up into the endless Forest of Untruths, swinging from vine to vine like the lying monkey he is.

So one afternoon a few years back  he's a tad bored and engineers a convo with a pal, so he can end it with the phrase cool beanz and then, pause,  innocently ask if his amigo knows where the saying comes from.

His…

W hen he saw the girl he was overwhelmed with a very odd feeling—she was unconventionally pretty, too lanky, hair of a carrot-top kid growed-up, freckles everywhere, off-white strong but wonky teeth and pale blue eyes of the white-spumed sea, Ireland perhaps or the Faroes, and her eyes met his and something happened to…

Are tiny memories, replicated to the  hundred thousand, nostalgia-memes that run through our society?

Some stop at national borders: that first meal in the Chick-fil-A booth or, much later, the queer snog in the same booth as protest.

Some cross continents: teen girls rapturously howling Like A Virgin to the bemusement of frail grannies with walking sticks in Brooklyn and Rome.

Some are so tiny and  subtle:  only awakened to be re-lived instantly, tactility and…

Sharing a pack of gum is uncontroversial, most colleagues won't be impressed if you help yourself to a swig from their water bottles but my friend D___  shares her hand cream.

It comes out of her purse (a miracle of discovery worth its own story), she  squeezes a dainty line on her palm, and proffers the tube to a girl-friend who repeats the manoevure but hesitates before offering to…

Tony works in the marble and oak-panelled basement of a law building; a 12 by 15 off the corridor  with barely room for The Chair and three wicker-panelled ones to wait on.

Tony has been there for 32 years but he has no son and the six grand-children who adorn the mirror, mostly boys, all close-cropped thick black hair, white smiles and young olive skin, will not follow him.

He is old-school and this place, his domain, smells of pomade and witch-hazel, clipper-oil and  men,…

The opposite of a bleeding wound is the dry desert. The opposite of its scorpion is a cactus flower. The opposite of the flower is stench of stale sweat. The opposite of its owner is a prim Boston maid.  The opposite of her scorn was suicide. The opposite of the gun in his hand became that bleeding wound.

Yet once I'm off that whale-backed hill

in a snug aside the bar

with a pint of beer and shepherd's pie

those cries seem so afar.

Then I laugh at tales of witches

and the gibbet where they died,

but will I walk that hill again at dusk?

—Oh no, I say. Not I.



But at morn' I think of Demdyke

her daughter and her kin

imprisoned deep and hanged up high

and murdered for their sin.

So p'rhaps I will that hill again

in…

Today I walked upon the upper side

where earth and heaven sundered by the sky

and loaming clouds roll wind-beat grey

cross Pendle Hill at end of day.

Touch of rains, misted clinging wet

breaks and roils, beading face and neck

skin-soaking cold but earth-fragrant sing

and carried in the the silence of the winds.

Then through the gloom lamenting cries are heared

wind-borne ripping, to break the hissing still

and as terror takes my heart in…

Pott's Fracture I ain't got

though Tim Haynes has squished me

six foot plus to five foot eight

I wished the bleeder missed me

at 2nd half—in fairness

I'd caught a scrum half fly

—but that was in the previous half

for that I nearly died?

He caught me in the act

of leaping like a hare

and although I was good to run

the ball was nowhere there,

Chase the ball! Down the line!

your's…