Shirley McKay, Fate & Fortune (Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd, 2010)
This second Hew Cullan mystery begins two years after the events of the first. It is 1581: Hew has returned to St Andrews on the death of his father, a man rendered a stranger to him through time and distance.
Continue reading “[book review] Shirley McKay: Fate & Fortune”
You almost feel sorry for the Spanish …
Today marks the day when the undeniably mighty Armada, reeling from a night attack by fireships and blocked from retreating down the Channel, was pummelled by English ships and scattered northwards by storms. Unable to regroup, they tried – and many failed – to get home the hard way, via Scotland and Ireland.
“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” [a]
This one is, I think, for my friend, Joe Gifford.
Back in the heady days of the beginning of this project, I likened close reading to autopsies and archaeology. Today, I present you with a sexy new metaphor: close reading IS the red pill in The Matrix …
No, really – let me persuade you. Continue reading “Forensic Friday (#017): 1 Henry IV, I.iii”
It’s often said, often bitterly, that we get the leaders we deserve. After all, ’we voted for them’, right? Or at least broadly 100,000 have: in a population of 65-million-odd, way less than 1% have made Boris ‘Bolinbroke’ Johnson our Prime Minister. Quite clearly ‘the will of the British people’ in the twenty-first century is a highly elusive and nebulous concept.
Right here, right now, the question of the type of leader we want, need, or deserve is as urgent as it has been since the end of the Second World War. As is the debate about whether we prefer harsh truths or comforting lies …
Welcome to our latest stop on the Pony Tail Shakespeare read-through 1 Henry IV, Act I scene iii. Continue reading “PTS 015/092: not MY leader …”
Dying in 1587, just as Shakespeare probably got going, Mary Queen of Scots has been a peripheral figure in my reading, writing and teaching over the past few years. Perhaps unjustly. In her book, ‘Elizabeth & Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens’, Jane Dunn fascinatingly posits that one queen can only be defined by contrast to her rival.
It’s easy to forget that Shakespeare pre-dates social media …
‘We’re sitting here like a couple regular fellas. You do what you do. I do what I gotta do. And now that we have been face-to-face, if I am there and I got to put you away?
(pause)
I won’t like it. But, if it’s you, or some poor bastard whose wife you’re going to turn into a widow, brother, you are gonna go down.’ [a]
What if Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots had met … ?
By the time you read this I will be gone. Long gone. And I won’t be back for, ooh, six weeks. School’s out for summer!
Well, we got no class
And we got no principals
We ain’t got no intelligence
We can’t even think of a word that rhymes [a]
I can almost hear Falstaff singing this, not Alice Cooper …
Don’t knock teacher holidays until you have tried the profession for a few years. You’ll soon realise that half-term weeks are misnomers, and should be labelled ‘admin / sleep’ weeks, and large chunks of the longer holidays are eaten up by marking or planning. We’re not actually that much better off than other professions when it comes to quality time pretending your job doesn’t exist.
Consider Frodo Baggins …
As comfortable middle age approaches, he’s broadly minding his own business, apart from the desire to perhaps go on a few more foreign holidays. Sure, he’s a little eccentric, and keeps a more eclectic circle of friends and acquaintances than many. But fundamentally a ‘nice, well-spoken gentle-hobbit‘, as Gaffer Gamgee might say. Looking forward to not much more than another 50-60 years of smoking his pipe on the doorstep of Bag End; hiking through the Shire at night; writing; and keeping out of the way of those dreadful oiks, the Sackville-Bagginses.
Adventures? No thank you.
All is well, until that meddling magician, Gandalf arrives …
Continue reading “QotW (#82) Some Have Greatness Thrust Upon Them”
It’s been a long, hard year, and I need a real treat …
Whilst it’s not all been bad news, Spring Term was dominated by an insidious, invidious, but ultimately innocuous illness that lingered like an unwelcome guest at a party, refusing to take all the hints I could throw at it that it needed to exit stage left. Summer Term replaced that with a series of professional setbacks and niggles that have led to my heavy-hearted decision to leave a school I always thought I would (eventually) retire at, and where I work daily alongside some of my closest friends. ‘You do the math‘, as Shakespeare never said.
I’m currently open to offers inside and outside the profession, by the way …
1 Henry IV Act I scene ii is, really, all about that devastating soliloquy in which Hal channels Lon Chaney jr.
But before that, I want to have a word about … EXPOSITION.
The Boar's Head, Eastcheap 