Category Archives: Out and about

The Christmas lights are going up in my home town of Langport. Well, I call them ‘Christmas lights’, according to the organisers, they are ‘winter festival’ lights.  This is simply a piece of secular bigotry. Of course, they would argue … Continue reading →

In June of this year, it was a privilege to visit the graves or memorials to High Ham men on the Western Front. Photographs were taken at each location, but some seem to have been lost. Bryson Bellot Lieut. N.S.Y … Continue reading →

Aleister Crowley? You don’t expect the name of the old charlatan to crop up in an episode of Van der Valk. Twenty-First Century crime series don’t generally engage with the sort of pre-modern occult ideas propagated by a man dead … Continue reading →

The long summer holiday brings a season of crime.  Even while in France two weeks ago, I found a German channel carrying episodes from the Kenneth Branagh incarnation of Wallander. (It was odd watching an English language programme with foreign subtitles). … Continue reading →

My supervisor had been working in Poland and Latvia for the past two weeks. ‘There were surprises’, he said, ‘things I had not expected. In post-Soviet countries, it was surprising to find hippies’. I recalled seeing a documentary about the … Continue reading →