ofthewedge

rooting around for grubs in diverse soils

  • Cunning linguists

    I want to understand you, I study your obscure language. Pushkin It is always gratifying to read something that chimes sympathetically with your own experience. Living in Brussels and speaking bits of sundry other European languages, I rather dread the ‘It’s ok we can speak English’ interjection, so ubiquitous among Euroland’s hyper-educated non-native speakers. Germans do it a lot (believing Read more

  • Twentieth Century Blue

    With Britain’s declaration of war on Germany 100 years ago this week the old ‘ornamentalist’ order (David Cannadine) began to self-destruct. A year earlier in 1913, George Butterworth, grainily recorded here reviving folk dances, had composed his melodious ‘idyll’, the Banks of Green Willow, as if a soundtrack to the last spring of old England. Read more

  • Murder most fowl

    Meat’s supply chain was already gruesome, but the Guardian’s special report last night plumbed its disease-ridden depths. The laggard fringes of civilisation are commonly situated where people still resort to violence to settle their differences, such as the attritional civil wars in Syria and southern Sudan, or the tit-for-much-larger-tat exchanged between Hamas and Israel. Where Read more

  • Gesamtkunstwerk

     A few years ago, during the conflagrative, diluvial climax of a performance of the Ring Cycle in Covent Garden, my finger ventured north, on a discreet reconnaissance Mission, into a nostril. Duly it alighted upon, and opportunistically hacked out, a deeply entrenched bogey. This intervention unleashed a tide of blood, which I struggled desperately to Read more

  • Breakfast with Germany

    I was about to write something grumpy about Germans in hotels. I was going to complain at how, at the breakfast buffet, stern Teutons hover impatiently on your shoulder while you wait for the coffee machine, as if you, whether personally or by implication, are responsible for holding up the onward advance of civilisation, with them in Read more

  • In Tune

    The best thing on the radio is In Tune on Radio 3. Teatime diversion, which thanks to the time difference coincides with our return from creche. Sean Rafferty’s camp, easy interviewing style, delivered in posh Ulster brogue is quite captivating. Take last week when he asked his guest jazz musician Curtis Stigers  how he liked to spend Read more

  • Elite

    I am always fascinated by photos of famous or brilliant people. Their frozen images are still and powerless. You struggle to visualise them as moving living creatures, impatient to be progressing their private agendas, certain in their own rightness. In my days I have at times trespassed on the personal space of such individuals, and Read more

  • La Serenissima

    The collection of stones that form the city of Venice has been in place for a long time. Its tired fabric is the familiar Italian backdrop: flaking walls, stripped facades, stone railing on bridges rubbed smooth as marble from millions of eager hands, proud coats of arms worn almost to indistinction by the centuries, usually Read more

  • Had we never lov’d sae blindly

    Last night I spent a couple of hours in Scotland House for their Burns Night concert. I knew no one so I floated around for a few minutes eyeing up some photography of the Isle of Muck before a low-slung Weegie beamed over to me. We made polite conversation until a towering old man from Read more

  • Epiphany #472

    Pre-dawn, standing over the Bialetti, waiting for the second thrust of coffee through the nozzle (why doesn’t it come out on in one go?), I slowly recognised the overture to the Flying Dutchman on the radio, and thoughts cast back to my solitary ramblings in London in the 2000s. One moment that sticks is the Read more