Kevin Jordan says he was asleep when his world caved in. Then he corrects himself: “I wasn’t asleep. I can’t sleep, when there’s a storm blowing…”
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While Vladimir Putin rains death on Ukraine, the former Armageddon factory of Orford Ness has been reinvented in favour of life.
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it’s a big lump of rock and it’s very English (old-fashioned cafes and lots of weather) without quite being England. A place to blow a trumpet to your heart’s content and see life from a wry angle.
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On the A35 just east of Bridport in Dorset the hubcap of a Skoda marked the spot where the future King Charles almost lost the plot. On the run, with a price on his head, he decided on the spur of the moment to hang a left up a road called Lee Lane. Good move …
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This outpost of England – shrinking, shapeshifting – is eerie and beautiful, with vivid green fields unrolling to frangible cliffs and empty beaches. Not to everyone’s taste maybe, but its otherworldliness casts a spell on some.
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Some detectorists will tell you that the holy grail of metal detecting is a hoard of Roman coins or Anglo-Saxon jewellery. Others will point out – borrowing a line from the TV series Detectorists – that actually the holy grail of metal detecting is the Holy Grail…
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Russell “Rusty” Waughman is 98 years old and describes himself as “just an ordinary bloke”. For 27 years he worked for a packaging company near Kettering and he still lives in the house he bought for “£1,650 with all the extras” in 1956. But for a period of seven months in 1943 and 1944 he inhabited a parallel universe as the pilot and skipper of an Avro Lancaster…
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It’s low tide on the Thames in London. At Rotherhithe on the south bank I descend rickety wooden stairs to a foreshore littered with iron nails and rivets – from the time when the dock here was a site of boatbuilding then of boat breaking.
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Something is missing in the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel – George. That’s the name of a shrunken head from Peru which I remember seeing in the Smoke Room a decade ago. It’s just as well it’s gone – such a grisly trophy had surely outlived its shock value – but it’s also a surprise. To quote the Talking Heads song the PyG is a Heaven “where nothing/Nothing ever happens.”
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Sunderland in May. The sun was trying, and failing, to get out and the ruffled grey sea was what people sometimes describe as pewter. In the bar of the Marriott Hotel I sat where Laurence Stephen Lowry used to sit half a century ago.
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