Other Men's Flowers

The longest singing career ever was probably that of Danshi Toyotaki of Hyogo, Japan, who sang in Musume Gidayu for 91 years from the age o...

Like many of the posts in Other Men's Flowers, this one is of little interest to Americans or anyone born after the Reichstag was set on...

Imagine waking up long before sunrise, walking for more than two hours to the nearest river or borehole and then carrying a bucket full of ...

(William of Wykeham: motto of Winchester College and New College, Oxford. Not really relevant but I couldn’t think of another title) I was h...

This is a continuation of the previous post, in which I promised to write something of interest to people wanting a change from shovelling s...

Reading with enjoyment the other day of the arrest and indictment of Conrad Black, it occurred to me that Other Men's Flowers has paid i...

Gardening and keeping a blog are similar pursuits in several ways: admirable, solitary, not too expensive, absorbing and providing salutary ...

We all know how to say thank you in Japanese (though remember if you’re in Okinawa it’s Nihwee-deebiru ). And if someone says it to you it...

Tom Lehrer’s Russian mathematician explaining how to reach the top in that field: Plagiarise! Let no-one else’s work evade your eyes Remembe...

I have just been watching the TV replay of the ceremony in Whitehall and I am sorry now that I used the title Lest We Forget for a post dep...

Our school song was a rousing number but the lyrics were in Latin, which meant that few of us ever had much idea of what it was about. It wa...

Ever since, at the age of eight, I was one of the finalists in the contest for the annual Lucy Beamish Prize for Good Behaviour in Class, I ...

As I write I am watching Tony Blair perspiring gently and writhing under the polite and gentle questioning of cuddly old Jon Snow, alternati...

I suppose Anne and I would place ourselves as middle class, though in terms of antecedents we are a totally disparate pair. Anyway, we hardl...

For weeks now the press has been unable to make up its mind about Tony Blair's position. Some papers say one thing, some another; some c...

Tectonic plates, global warming and so on are difficult concepts for the layman to grasp, and many look to religion or philosophy rather tha...

We acquired a rather spectacular fennel bulb, the size of a melon, and wanted a new way to cook it; we don’t much like them raw and we usua...

Never mind about Christmas beginning in August, we are now seeing on TV a rash of poppies on lapels. Presumably everyone is running scared b...

To answer that question sensibly, it seems to me, you would need to ask another intellectual of similar calibre, and intellectuals being wh...

We all resent the huge power of the supermarket chains and deplore the effect they are having on our towns, and we all get in the car and go...