Author Archives: Ian

Needing a happy ending

Posted on 21st June 2024 by Ian

Forty years ago, in the summer of 1984, I read most of Jean Paul Sartre’s novel Iron in the Soul, the third volume in a trilogy called the Roads to Freedom. A piece of existentialist fiction, it is set against the … Continue reading →

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Paying my way

Posted on 8th June 2024 by Ian

The notices advise of road closures in two weeks’ time, the tens of thousands heading to the pop festival at Pilton will cram the routes It is 45 years since I attended the Glastonbury festival.  The attendance was 12,000, a … Continue reading →

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Voulez-vous?

Posted on 22nd April 2024 by Ian

‘The Beatles will be remembered long after Abba have been forgotten.’ It was an assertion with which it would have been hard to argue.  It was the late 1970s and Abba were at the height of their popularity, but the … Continue reading →

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In this world and the next

Posted on 28th March 2024 by Ian

There was a poetry in the hymns we sang at High Ham Primary School.  Apart from the entirely banal When a knight won his spurs, the choices from our hymnbook were weighty in theological and literary terms.  Even to someone … Continue reading →

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In memoriam: Private Henry Lines

Posted on 10th March 2024 by Ian

‘Their name liveth for evermore’. It was Rudyard Kipling’s idea to put words from the Hewbrew Scriptures’ book of Ecclesiasticus on the Stone of Remembrance in each war cemetery.  Kipling similarly composed the lines, ‘A Soldier of the Great War. … Continue reading →

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