Other Men's Flowers

Back in the sixties I wrote a letter to a local paper (I had a lot of time on my hands) expressing some trenchant views about a concert hall...

Every two years the UK publishing industry chooses a distinguished writer or illustrator of children's books as Children's Laureate ...

Fictional characters are rarely the subject of genealogical research, but the ancestors of Pilot-Officer Prune were thoroughly investigated ...

Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg loved a good joke but discovered during the First World War that these were no...

Actually he has nine major ones and many others; it was just that I couldn't think of a caption for this magnificent picture . Please, n...

By way of light relief to the discussions about the world economy, we might give some thought to another current news item, the prospect of ...

You are allowed to eat matzos even if you have never made the acquaintance of a mohel, and I quite like them; it came as a shock to me three...

No 15 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century January 1970: A cryptic message from EP in Kensington to Mr Keatey in...

In the groupblog BoingBoing I read the other day about a random stop-and-search carried out on a Londoner by two officers of the Transport ...

To say that the Belgians call them zeepaling (sea eel), the Germans call them seeaal (sea eel again) and that they are known to the French...

Living in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century can't have been much fun. The Métro was being built and most of it wasn'...

After being caught (momentarily) last Wednesday by a hoax news item, I merely smiled indulgently when I saw in the same edition of the Guar...

It's a pity that photography was still in its infancy on June 22nd, 1897, when 50,000 troops marched through London, for this picture ma...

No 14 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century , November 1960: From Margaret to the Brierleys in Stockport, Cheshire....

Look, I can't really be criticized for being fooled yesterday, can I? It was only for a few seconds; well, say half a minute. I mean, I ...

More recycled posts from 2004 people Former radical toff becomes lovable old geezer religion A lunatic plan for a mass migration of fruitcak...

In a comment to a post published in Other Men's Flowers (by mistake) on March 19th, I mentioned a Balinese dancing girl who has become s...

Just lately both large and small screens seem to have been offering me a diet very heavy on gritty realism, horror and steamy sex. But not e...

There's a lot of fun to be had playing with Google's Search Trends, which can count the the number of searches made for any key word...

"So it's agreed. We support your claim to the throne if you appear on our shortbread tins." David Haldane, 1982 (The Best of ...