Northcote Corner…Quiet Please.
"Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.”
It’s Sunday morning, and it’s raining. Heavily. The rain hits the gutters with the precision of Buddy Rich; it syncopates against the windows, sparks against the red planter in the garden; and makes the tyres sing a silky song as the cars sail along the tarmac by my door. It was a rainy day in... Continue Reading →
Years of using disposable and cartridge razors. Hundreds, if not thousands of little bits of plastic, all ending up in landfill. Hundreds of tins of shaving cream and gel, all powered by chemical propellant. All choking up the earth. As for the aerosol foams and gels, they use a propellant to deliver the product into... Continue Reading →
Southern Trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and Blood at the roots. Black bodies swingin’ in the southern breeze. Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant South... The bulging eyes, and the twisted mouth. Scent of magnolia, clean and fresh. Then the sudden smell, of burnin' flesh. Here... Continue Reading →
This is the story of Emmett Louis Till. He was a young man from Chicago. In August 1955, he travelled to a town called Money, Mississippi, to stay with relatives, including his uncle, Mose Wright. Emmett was only 14 years old. He was, by all accounts, a lively, happy mischievous kid who liked to spend... Continue Reading →
In part 1, I talked about the type of men who were attracted to the KL; why they joined, and how they became inculcated and inured to the violence. How they soon became willing cogs in the machine. Here, I’d like to examine the context in which the machine grew, and the motivations which enabled... Continue Reading →
‘may the world at least behold a drop, a fraction of this tragic world in which we lived.’ (Salutation by Chaim Zalman Gradowski, Auschwitz 1943) When I first encountered Nikolaus Wachsman’s book ‘KL - A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps’, I half-expected an account of the Holocaust in the vein of so many others.... Continue Reading →
My post ‘1938 - The World Turns’ discussed some of the issues of Neville Chamberlain and the British Government's policy of appeasement towards European dictators in the 1930's, particularly Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. I portrayed Chamberlain as a somewhat misdirected figure, arrogant and naive in his belief that war could be avoided by meeting Hitler's... Continue Reading →
I mentioned in ‘and about me’ how Shirer's book gave me a sense of the breadth of the Second World War as a subject for study; of how I came to understand that it had roots way before the shameful carving-up of Poland between Hitler and Stalin. In the years preceding that infamous act, another,... Continue Reading →
Postman’s Park - a place for reflection... Just by way of a change, today's tale is not about war, social upheaval, or the incredible changes which characterised the twentieth century. Because today I took delivery of a book about a little-known corner of London's social history - Postman's Park, in the City of London; and... Continue Reading →
Northcote Corner...Quiet Please. 