Ordinary Glories

Whole publications, industries, lives even, revolve around the pleasure that some people get from the choosing of clothes. It would be foolish for me, who delights in many much stranger hobbies, to denigrate the millions for whom this is a joy-giving aspect of existence, but I must confess, the opposite is true for me. If the selection of clothes does ever bring me joy it is, paradoxically, when no real selection is required whatsoever. When, in anticipation of a day romping around lanes and fields where, if I am un lucky I might bump into two or three other souls, I can throw on whatever is closest to hand. I recall once, when back in the midst of my family, I threw on just such an outfit that consisted of an old shirt of my father’s, a jumper, scarred from active service on the frontline in the back of the wardrobe taking the battle to the moths, some tracksuit bottoms, a pair of wellington boots and a coat which, when I returned from said ramble, one of my sisters informed me, w...

To admit to being a ‘collector of strange tastes’ sounds as if one is a Victorian trying to confess to a fixation with pornography or a middle aged Englishman in some century past, explaining what precisely it is he is up to in Marrakesh. I must confess I mean neither such thing- after all, Marrakesh has now joined Lisbon, Barcelona, Bath, and Berlin as one of those cities plagues with couples on long weekends, and so I fear it would take a particularly concerted effort by wild horses to get me there. But let us not dwell on the negative or the euphemistic vocabularies of the past: the strange tastes that I delight in observing and then collecting (if committing to memory might be counted as such) are those of others, the discovery of unlikely or unexpected passions held by those whom we think we know. There are many reasons to delight in the seemingly counter-intuitive tastes of others. On one level it is, I suppose, somewhat voyeuristic, the equivalent of a glimpse into ...

I cannot think of cider without thinking of a particular early summer, that of 2014, in all its teeth rotting, gut gurgling glory. I am stood in the narrowness of the Lamb and Flag Passage, the Oxford wind cold (for summer is always too late and too short in that strange Narnia of a city) and the stares from tight-lipped cyclists are even colder. We- for I am invariably there with a good solid reprobate of a friend as little inclined to work as I am and with the college groundsman, - half stand, half perch on the tiny stunted window ledge and there drink pint after pint of it- sweet, cheap and sticky. It made us, I think good humoured, imparting the spirit of the Devonian commune or the medieval midsummer festival. We would lose count early- not least because the kindly groundsman would almost always buy, allowing perhaps the sixth or seventh round to be bought for him, as a gesture towards social norms. En route to that moment we would wend our way through old rivalries, imagined ...

That English is a language replete with strange idiom is one of those truisms that is all the more irritating because it is true. Of course, such an observation does not imply any particularity on the part of my mother tongue: when the Czechs prevaricate they chodit kolem hork é ka š e which, being translated means, to walk around hot porridge, while when the Zulu wishes to refer to a borrowed object it is into yomuntu umhluzi wempisi­ - soup made from the hyena. You will, no doubt, be calling to mind your favoured examples- those terms we notice aged relatives deploy in our youth and then spend years vowing we’d never say such a thing only to notice, one day amidst the ordinary round of life, that this once mocked phrase is now a firm feature of our vocabulary. None of this, however, detracts from the truth of the strangeness of English idiom. Indeed, some of it is so strange as to wander, pleasingly, from the path of discernible accuracy, and so adding, no doubt, another l...

Every six weeks or so it is my duty and delight to take Holy Communion to Liz, a once stalwart member of our congregation now no longer able to make it to church. She lives in the part of Liverpool to which I would bring anyone sceptical of this great city’s charms. These people, I am reliably informed, still exist and are, in a show of pity by the state, allowed onto trains unsupervised (or, at least, they were…). Should such a person arrive at Lime Street station, I would whisk them, instantly, a few stops down one of the Merseyrail lines to where Liz, every six weeks or so, kindly invites me in and we share her memories and her tea and his body and blood. To reach this sanctuary, one has to walk down a street lined with vast piles of mortar and brick, gothic and classical testaments to the far reach of Liverpool shipping in the age of Victoria. Indeed these sallied ranks of mansions and villas lead, eventually, to the Mersey, the very vein of money, blood and mud that made su...

I am a person who delights in negativity- no, wait, come back!- this is a mea culpa , not a manifesto. This is something of which I have long been aware; it is usually easier and always funnier to dwell on the failings and faults of a thing or a person or a place. I had meant, however, as a conscious act of Lenten rigour to dwell at least as often on those things that brought me joy in a less judgemental manner. This is not a renunciation of adherence to Swiftian misanthropy (I wonder what such an auto-da-f é would involve? I would doubtless be made to wear a sanbenito with ‘LIVE LAUGH LOVE’ emblazoned on it and then immolated inside a giant yellow Minion, all while the inquisitor reads from The Little Book of Hygge. But I digress and shall now have to start again). Ahem. This is not a renunciation of adherence to Swiftian misanthropy- far from it- rather it is an admitting that, for there to be such manifold negativity, there must be some positives lurking out there in orde...