Secrets of Happy Family Life

2189. Husband and Wife.—Being hints to each other for the good of both, as actually delivered at our own table :— 2190. Hints for Wives.—If your husband occasionally looks a little troubled when he comes home, do not say to him, with an alarmed countenance, " What ails you, my dear ? " Don't bother…

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Dimples

I mentioned "Dimples" by John Lee Hooker in The Day the President Died. I have two copies of the Dimples album, both of the same quality. One of them is for sale, drop me a line if you're interested. Here's the title song: Here's what happened, as reported in the post linked above A friend…

Live Dead

"Live Dead explains why the Dead are one of the best performing bands in America, why their music touches on ground that most other groups don’t even know exists. "A list of song titles would mean very little in terms of what actually goes on inside the album. Like the early Cream, the Dead in…

Strange Angels

This CD is one of several I picked up free at the Wycombe Counselling Service. Someone had left a pile of cds in a spare room with a note saying help yourself, with a little tray for donations to maintain the service. Before introducing Strange Angels,  please permit me a rambling digression. I worked there…

Rumours

"As of February 2023, Rumours has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, making it the sixth best-selling album of the 1970s, and the 12th best-selling album of all time." (Wikipedia). I'd never heard of Fleetwood Mac until their first hit, the instrumental "Albatross", released in 1968. and though Rumours came out in '77, I never…

For you, on my birthday

It's my birthday (eighteen backwards) and I'm feeling fine, thanks to our blessed NHS and all its pills keeping me alive day by day, especially their gift of Codeine as and when needed—which is quite often. Coming to the point, I have a small set of CDs and books, so precious that when I lost…

A cryptic crossword, explained

Cryptic crosswords are a British invention. The first ones were printed in the Daily Telegraph. Unless you have knowledge of British geography (especially rivers, counties and towns), games (especially cricket), past prime ministers, abbreviations. you'll flounder helplessly. The English language has an impressive range of metaphoric expressions, some of which you can see here. We…

Escaping from a Festival

We're a bunch of old friends from University days, on our way to somewhere in Wales, in an old Land Rover. Without our copy of The Readers Digest Book of Roads (400 pages), cross-referenced to signposts, we'd have had no chance. Our route takes us up hill and down dale, in a maze of narrow…

Eagle Flew Out Of the Night

Waking up at 3 am, I find a song playing endlessly in my head. Not just the tune, but some of the words too. It's one of the most extraordinary popular songs, more potent than anything by Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. Peter Gabriel has his own explanation for how it hatched in his mind…

‘Fitness’ in the Design of Form

Postscript Here's an overview of the author's life and work on YouTube:   Many years ago, when I worked at Zeus-Hermes, I read a piece in Computer Weekly mentioning Notes on the Synthesis of Form. I couldn't get a copy anywhere till I bought one on an obscure shelf in the world famous bookshop, Foyles.…

In Bed This Morning

Transcribed from our conversations and my scribbled notes Part 1 We both woke up at the same time: 6:40. I often wake at 5.30 and read till she wakes at 6.30. I had a strange dream of living in a foreign land. Where am I? What am I doing here? But then I discovered my…

From my desktop

This one's for Cindy. Despite the distance between us—she lives with family near St Louis, Missouri—we've kept in touch for many years by email, and she's made lots of comments on posts here. ----- I shall look no further for inspiration beyond my physical desktop. As bought from Ikea to fit in this corner position…

Planning One’s Endgame

When I set my mind to it, this head is crowded with enough memories to spend the rest of my life writing it all down, supposing I aim for two hours a day. But how do I know which bits will be of interest to future generations?. Modesty, probably false, wants to add "if any".…

Bel and the Dragon

We had planned a day out walking in Flackwell Heath, near High Wycombe, but the next bus wasn't due for an hour. Another bus was waiting for passengers to Maidenhead, so we got on that. We decided to get off at Cookham, where I knew a nice pub that I hadn't been in since 1965,…

Sailing into WebSpace

A while ago I created this website. It was before the days of blogs. I used some free kind of web design software. It was harder to use than blogger or WordPress, or so it seemed at the time, but provided some lovely backgrounds. The site is ian.mulder.clara.net. You can view it from any browser,…

The day Jack Kennedy died

https://www.youtube.com/embed/elt_nafQLm4 we danced to this again and again ... It was a Thursday evening on November 22 in 1963. I'd graduated that summer with a mediocre BA Hons from the University of Birmingham. I'd had some adventures after that—see this post for example. There was lots more. I'd earned a few quid selling ice-cream at…

Good Vibrations, good migration

 Revised on October 3rd Things have changed in my body & psyche. One is the worse for wear, the other has recovered after 6 weeks of insanity, diagnosed as an infection of the brain which like the common cold has cleared up by itself. During those 6 weeks my head ran wild ("Freak Out!") scaring…

Face-to-Face

The ghost of Christine Keeler is returning to public view, in the form of a TV series now on BBC, and a forthcoming exhibition in London, which I heard about through Natalie D'Arbeloff's blog, in which she says Christine Keeler was, in that story, simultaneously absolutely powerless and absolutely powerful. She was neither victim nor…

Life-story, part 1

I want to tell the story of my entire life up to the present: the bare-bones series of events, with no fanciful embroidery. Let it be like a series of chess moves without the expert commentary. Let it be like a dispassionate ship's log. Let the facts tell their own story. As far as possible,…

Eleventh Child

I woke in the night after a dream, went downstairs to jot it down in the great leatherbound book from Margaret in Canada; then went back to bed and slept again. On awakening once more in the morning, I jotted down another dream. I tried to polish up the drafts into something coherent, but it…

The gift of literacy

When she was ten days old, Karleen was placed in the care of her grandparents, leaving her mother free to come to England, get properly settled, then call for her daughter to join her. But when she began to talk, her great-grandmother took her and brought her home to the country parish of Westmoreland, where…

The girl who torpedoed the Government

We met on a summer afternoon in ’59, two 17-year-olds, Pisces born within days of each other. We discovered we had much in common. Both from fatherless backgrounds, lacking any proper home. Each had been granted a single talent, you might say, in compensation for the lack. As her father-figure Stephen Ward said, she had…

Passion and Society

The present train of thought started 54 years ago with a red book. Technically it was shoplifting but I thought of it as using the campus bookshop as a lending library. In mitigation of the offence, I returned it stealthily to the original shelf ten days later. That was the hard part, very scary. I’ve…

The Gordian Knot

Carved on the St. Madoes Stone in Perthshire, Scotland (9th Century) A Celtic knot made from one continuous line The sword is not just a symbol of killing. In the days before stainless steel, a sharp bright sword was a symbol of value and power. Famous or magical swords had names. Excalibur is raised out…

Fingers and Moon

I was dumbfounded: confounded and struck dumb at the same time. It was a congenial place to be, I discovered, being content to stay there a while, sheltered in the dignity and grace of not knowing, that is, shedding false knowledge. . . . First published on July 15th 2015 and reissued to complement Natalie…

Jua Kali

It’s spring and that creates a fruitful restlessness in me, a primitive, profound and timely desire to die to my old self and be resurrected. It’s too inward, physical, dynamic and inchoate to be directly described, so I am left speechless. It doesn’t make sense to call it writer’s block, for that would imply the…

The Horoscope

After replacing my old bookshelves, I was restless for more domestic improvements, so launched into tidying up a collection of papers I’ve been carrying around for years, and throwing away the dross. That’s when I found a document dating from December 1974, which I’ve taken care not to throw away throughout the vicissitudes of 40…

The happy ending

Three years ago today, on a certain occasion, I received this gift bag A couple of weeks ago I had a visit from my headmaster*. He’s long dead of course, but dreams have something in common with memory and ghosts—which the French call “revenants”—returning ones. With no difficulty, they can span the passage of time.…

On fresh air alone

If you want to go somewhere and enjoy an undisturbed smoke I suggest the Nineteen-Fifties. If you were actually around at the time, it’s no problem—wings of memory will take you and your membership remains free for life. Otherwise you need to be escorted as a guest. I’ll do my best to take you to…

A Coney Island of the Mind

This is for you, dear poet of my youth, still 23 years and 21 days older than me (therefore 95), still here with the rest of us, enabling me to write this with a possibility it might reach you. I would say I’ve admired you from afar, but it’s not true, for I spent fifty…

Perspectives and Remembrance

This post is one of several recently rescued and restored from Blogger, where it was published on May 11th, 2014. The emblem of this blog is a weathervane with a gilded Centaur, standing above a cupola on top of the 18th century Guildhall, in the market square of this fictional town of Wye Vale, built…

Blessedness

Days pass quickly, like the view from a speeding train; or from this footbridge, under which I hear the roar and clatter of a train below, watch it round the curve and disappear into the tunnel, leaving emptiness and the memory of its presence. Externally, each day resembles the one before; but so much happens…

Me and the Little Rock Nine

My Headmaster’s great vision Now that my birthday’s out of the way—it’s become a family event, this year bigger than last—the most exciting thing going on in my life is Winter’s retreat and Spring’s approach: the great drama of the seasons. I like it when nothing more than that is happening, for then I can…

In Memoriam: Derek Helman

Earlier this month I published a piece entitled In Memoriam: ..., followed by the name of my late friend from fifty years ago. Part of my intention was to bring him back to life in my own mind, and if possible my reader’s too. But what most inspired the effort was the wish expressed in…

Prophetic words from 1976

In 1976 when I wrote the essay below for a competition, it was already possible to link computers by telephone line, but an international structure, eventually called the Internet, wasn’t established till 6 years later. Its use was limited to academics and technical types keeping in touch, till Tim Berners-Lee invented the World-Wide Web, nine…

Hitching to Heaven

There are things in my past I prefer not to revisit, as mentioned in comments on the previous post. ‘Cult’ comes from the Latin cultus, worship. In certain contexts it refers to “a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister”. I was involved with a cult…

In memory of George Whitman, 1913-2011

I once spent a few weeks as George Whitman’s guest in his bookshop opposite Notre Dame in Paris. Today I heard of his death on the news. I’ve mentioned him three times on this blog: in May 2008, May 2009 and Feb 2011*. It has always been difficult to write about the man himself, for…

In the thistle field, at dawn

I lie in bed watching dawn’s rosy fingers light up the house opposite, creeping lower as the hour advances. This street is narrow, its houses joined together (‘terraced’) in a continuous chain on both sides. You’d think there’d be scant room for the low-slanting rays to penetrate. But our house is near the street’s eastern…

Wittgenstein

The other day I was writing about being nineteen and somehow feeling the same way fifty years later. But it was a mysterious feeling because I could not adduce a single instance of nineteenhood to illustrate my point. So it is a coincidence that I first discovered Wittgenstein at that age. Discovered is hardly the…

A modest school reunion

I often “dwell in the past”. It’s a fabulous museum, where you can look at the same exhibits time and again, and discover new ones you hadn’t noticed before, and see the familiar ones from new angles. My fondness for this pastime owes a lot to my sense that I didn’t live my life fully…

Night and Day

If Day is the realm of Nature, then Night—at any rate to this brain, at this hour of darkness, still a long way from dawn—is the domain of artificiality. There are other claimants to the imperial mantle of Night. The most democratic, the winner of the majority vote, is Sleep. But I am interested in…

A fig-leaf for David

My previous post wound up with the words "I got a job as assistant to a cinematographer making an educational movie about Michelangelo. But that’s a tale for another day." It’s the 6th of August 1962. I’m sitting on the steps outside the Duomo, Florence’s cathedral, trying to work out whether I’m a student, an…

Old photos

I've been loaned a set of family photos and it's a voyage of discovery, reminding me of aspects of my childhood and introducing me to the childhood of my own grandparents.

At Mrs Jenkins’

Last night I watched My Left Foot, in which Daniel Day-Lewis plays the real-life Christy Brown, born to a family of thirteen in a Dublin slum with severe cerebral palsy. To his parents, it’s out of the question that he should be abandoned in an institution, but they cannot afford the home care and treatment…

Mau-Mau and Me

I lie soaking up warmth. Around me, steam rises like incense. I marvel like a savage at this jar of Royal Jelly and Pure Honey Moisture-Rich Cream Bath. What attracts me is the glittery swirls, as if the gunk inside were gold-dust bound with egg-yolk. As the list of ingredients doesn’t mention gold, the sparkle…

Dress code

In my last, I claimed that my long-standing writer’s block was over, and promised to continue my memoirs from where they left off last February at the age of fourteen. There has been plenty of scribbling since then but nothing fit to print. I wanted by some means to indicate “the story so far” so…

Intrinsic goodness

Back in the Sixties, I first came across some mysterious expressions from the other side of the Atlantic. I was working for a British company whose main rival was IBM. Both companies had built up a customer base selling punched-card equipment based on the nineteenth-century inventions of Herman Hollerith and his one-time colleague James Powers.…

Hole in the head

Phineas Gage was swift, capable, responsible. He was physically fit and a leader of men. These qualities made him at the age of 25 a supervisor on a Vermont railroad construction project; and might have helped him rise through the ranks to a senior management position in that branch of engineering. But the smooth track…

Encounter in a landscape

Belatedly, I discover that manual work is better than being desk-bound, better for the soul—and the world too, probably. But first some words to continue from yesterday’s set of photos. One of them shows part of the track I walked: down the hill through the nature reserve where the wild roses grew, then through high…

Cherrydown (3)

A Messerschmitt bubble-car There’s still a ragbag of memories to share with you about the time I spent in that house. If they have any common theme, I suppose it is wonders and miracles. I’m not saying there actually were any miracles: just incomprehensible things. I mentioned in a previous post that my mother started…

Cherrydown (2)

Anno 1956 Aetat. 14 If you have been following the halting progress of my childhood memoirs on this direct and intimate medium—where it is possible to publish worldwide before the ink has dried on one’s words though ink is not actually used—you might not be aware of just how halting the progress actually is. You…

Cherrydown (1)

Anno 1956 Aetat. 14 This post picks up my childhood memoirs from where Norfolk House (5): Fog on the Solent left off. We moved to a 1930s semi-detached house, “Cherrydown”, 8 Parkhurst Road, Newport [here photographed August 2008—it hasn’t changed since 1956]. For the first few days, my bed was in the dining room, which…

“The Head’s sermon”

A school-friend I have not seen face-to-face since the late Fifties has finally sent me a photocopy of an anthology of writings and drawings from that era. I thought it was mostly my work, but not at all, and my pieces were amongst the worst-written. The best pieces came from our freethinking maths master Mr…

Fog on the Solent (Norfolk House 5)

Royal Yacht Squadron, 1921: Norfolk House would be behind tree at right of church tower The Solent may have been the busiest sea-lane in the world and the most varied in its traffic. There were ferries between the mainland and our Island; the Royal Navy base at Portsmouth; the transatlantic liner port at Southampton; the…

Norfolk House 4: Vignettes

In “Nest of Dreams” I referred to awakening sexuality. A boy, especially if he has come into contact with no girls, doesn’t necessarily associate his burgeoning virility with those giggling, teasing creatures. It doesn’t surprise me that some take the other direction and stay that way. In my case, wet dreams had always been accompanied…

Norfolk House 3; the Back Story

Bungalow in Australia, with one of my “mothers” Beth said I was teasing, in my post Norfolk House (2). It’s so long since these memoirs were interrupted (since early September) that I ought to tell you The Story So Far. I have a head-cold today, but let us give it true dignity and call it…

Where Norfolk House stood

As I mentioned in my last, Norfolk House was destroyed long ago. It was crumbling when we moved in, and that was 1955. To write more about my sojourn there is more than the work of a day, but meanwhile, here is the Medina Estuary, showing West Cowes at the far end on the left,…

Norfolk House 1

(continued from here). . . Norfolk house was pulled down long ago. We moved there from Powys House, a tall granite Victorian building which still stands, a mile from Queen Victoria’s holiday home at Osborne. Norfolk House was in West Cowes: an Edwardian mansion with broad veranda and balcony overlooking the Solent, that busy strip…

Christmas 1944

This is me 63 years ago. I wish I had time to write more today.

The school yard

Me; the bullied boy; Rasmussen That aerial photo of the school helped arouse many memories, which in my life seem to be fastened upon places more than upon people. In that respect, I am more of a cat than a dog. I’m more introverted, solitary, not made to hunt in packs and defer to the…

King James I School

At the school there was a Scout Troop in addition to the Cadet Contingent. At some point in my bookish diversions I had read Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys and been seduced by it just like millions of others world-wide. The essence of this seductive power was contained in the bush-hat, the neckwear and the badge-adorned…

I bear his name

I’m clearing things out and waiting to move to another house and it’s a jittery time for there are delays and dramas, so I cannot write anything coherent. On the other hand I can’t do anything practical till things clarify. Meanwhile I discovered this photo whilst gathering old papers together and deciding what to throw…

Some rare photos

This one is late ’50 or early ’51. I'm in my stepfather's 1938 Hillman Minx, my mother in the front passenger seat. My half-sister stands outside. The reason I'm not wearing glasses is that my short sight had not yet been identified. They noticed at school around this time and the headmaster's wife* drove me…

Latin Class

Too much is happening in my life at present to write a proper post. The process of remembering schooldays has been action enough, so here is a photo from the archive entrusted to me. It's a Latin class. I hardly remember the master: he must have left soon afterwards. The boy shown highlighted is me.…

My new school

a: headmaster’s lawn (archery & other photogenic activities for school prospectus & to impress special visitors) b: school yard, cadets' parade ground etc c: bicycle shed d: WCs e: urinals f: Nissen hut (housing three classrooms) g: Headmaster’s study h: Form III (my first classroom) i: Assembly Hall j: kitchens k: (off picture) the Cadet…

Beach Party

I mentioned in my last that my mother started to assert herself in Powys House to try and dispel the ghosts of E. (Blackett’s first wife) and the easy ways of an engineers’ messroom in the Merchant Navy. To this end she now persuaded Blackett a) to buy a car and b) to hire some…

Home on the Island

I’m still not ready to take you through the gates of my new grammar school and show you round that extraordinary world. But it waits patiently, and when we start, the topic will span five years. In contrast, I was only at Powys House a year. That tall stone mansion had been built in the…

New day-school

My most vivid memories are not of the first days at my new day-school, as you might think, but of coming back home each afternoon. I’d been five years at boarding-school and could not imagine a greater luxury. Let out at 3.45, I’d arrive home from a country-bus ride, ravenous. My mother let me cut…

Leaving Maxiram

Every relationship carries its own end, as the seed lurks in the overblown flower, biding its time. One dies, the other is born. For the last few weeks, my computer password has been “freedom”, as if escape from MaxiRam would be unmingled joy. But it was oddly stressful to disentangle myself and finally hand in…

Peter and Johnny

Peter a few years later in school photo Ladies below are the school cooks David Battie, at left, is now an antiques expert on popular TV programmes I was 12 by the time I went to live on the Isle of Wight. The School Magazine of the Newport Grammar School, so kindly given to me…

The Wooing of Blackett

English divorce in the early Fifties wasn’t a sedate exchange of paperwork between lawyers. If you wanted to contest it—there was every reason to do so—you had to appear in court, and risk your pain being turned into Sunday morning entertainment by reporters from the News of the World. This humiliation happened to my mother…

Fantasies

Recalling materials for a memoir is like being an archaeologist. Sometimes you have to make do with nothing but a handle, or a spout. From this you deduce and reconstruct the rest of the jug whose fragments have been ground small by Time. Painstaking effort must be aided by guesswork, for you don’t have every…

Bicycle

Long ago, when we were 11 or 12, I received a wonderful favour from Cooksey. We used surnames only at prep school*, so Cooksey is all I have: hardly enough to track him down now. His parents were in Hong Kong, but at half-term, when almost every boy went away for the Saturday and Sunday,…

The headmaster’s wife

Lying awake at night, it’s as though I can draw back a curtain to expose deep alcoves of memory. It takes a little perseverance. Suddenly I recall that “perseverance” was a favourite word of Monty Brummell-Hicks, the scary headmaster of my prep school, that place I was sent for ten or twelve weeks at a…

Days at boarding-school

What distinguishes man from the other animals? I wish I had made a note of all the answers I’ve read. Perhaps someone somewhere has compiled a long list of them. Well here is another for the collection. What distinguishes man from the other animals is the vast spectrum of “normal”. Unlike ducks and pigeons, we…

Mr Sudell

One could write a memoir based on where one spent each night of one’s life. It would be like a tune on the black keys only, or a painting of the spaces between things, not the things themselves. But there would be blanks in my memoir if I tried that. I can remember when I…

Back Home from Hospital

The pianola When I reached home from hospital I was pleased to find I had a proper bedroom. Well, it was my baby sister’s room. Her cot had been moved to my parents’ room and I was assigned a mattress on the floor but I luxuriated in its sparse furnishings and relative comfort. I soon…

Released from hospital

It takes effort to wrestle the facts from memory. I thought that it was summer when I came out of hospital, and that it had been a six-month stay. But I was discharged in time to see a long queue outside a tobacconist / candy store in Harold Place, Hastings. The public record confirms that…

Admitted to hospital

Sketch by Francis Dodd, 1920 They put me in a bed with high-sided rails around it. I was offended at being put in what looked like a baby’s cot: me at nearly seven years old. I protested loudly and tearfully. If my first term at boarding-school had taught me anything, it was the importance of…

If I burn to death, they’ll be sorry

Drawing by Sally Faye Boarding school* for all its rigours was a respite from the neglect and loneliness of home. I find it difficult to speak of either, but our goal---yours and mine---is to be entertained and edified in the catharsis called human life. Merrion House School was a red-brick house once owned by Sir…

I still dream of that voyage

I’m not finished with the mv Rangitata, which brought me as a four-year-old from Fremantle to Tilbury. The Rangitata hasn’t finished with me either. Our acquaintance was a six-week voyage sixty years ago but memories can still be triggered; the shuddering vibration from its engines, the smells of hot paint, engine oil, bleach, disinfectant, sewage.…

Arriving in England

Where I roamed on the passage to England Thanks to Richard Overall Suddenly I learned that I was not half Dutch, as I had believed for fifty years, but half Australian. I had spent my life wanting to belong somewhere: to feel a kinship, a sense of family, to be able to say, “These are…

How I learned the truth

How I imagined my father Image source: Dolores (Continued from previous post) My mother’s beloved Singapore roadhouse was called The Gap: a prophetic name. After the war, it was nothing but a gap; one that she mourned forever and never really replaced. The gap in my life was a father. When I met him fifty…

How my mother met her husband

Thelma Todd would have been a role model for my mother Source: Sheila O’Malley I’ll tell you about my mother and how she got to spend the War years in a Perth suburb called Bassendean by the Swan River in Western Australia. As for my father, he lived there already. She was born in 1909…