Articles

                    Upper Fisher Row got a bite of the cake yesterday when scenes from the 8th series of the popular cop drama Lewis was  filmed, taking up all of our parking but providing entertainment for the many “home-bound” inhabitants who live here courtesy of the Council […] Read more

                    It’s the time of year when crowds throng the the quads of Oxford colleges, programmes in hand, thermos flasks and sandwiches  in carrier bags, to seek wit, wisdom entertainment and literary glamour among writers who have come to talk about their books (and promote sales) […] Read more

  The old bullock cart of democratic process has changed: it’s now a battered three wheeler which phuts along, breaking down every so often in clouds of  black fumes. Sometimes it almost sputters to a halt and lengthy debates erupt about its efficacy. Maybe the older image was better: the cart lumbered on, regardless. It […] Read more

I don’t think I have ever cried during a film as openly as I did while watching “Twelve Years a Slave”. On other occasions a slightly shaming  tear or two stands in my eyes before I dab it away. But Steve McQueen’s rendition of the 1853 diary of Samuel Northrup, a free black householder, musician, […] Read more

That the English are becoming (let’s say have become, not to put too fine an point on it) “almost a de-cultured people. From the shops in our high streets to the vocabulary we use, we are becoming a cheap and nasty imitation of the worst of consumer America. We can’t sing our own folk songs, […] Read more

South Oxford has always had a sad air of limp curtains and cooked cabbage about it; stalwart respectability and dullness, a look of pre-war utility and just “getting on with it”. Down the Abingdon Road, parallel to the river on the left, where the university scullers practise,  lie watermeadows that flood in the winter; on […] Read more

Twenty Years Back… This has been one of those mythical summers, when bees get drunk on obscenely gorgeous roses and honeysuckle, when Panama hats and straw boaters are essential wardrobe items, when proper thirst assumes reality, when grass shrivels and sun burns blisters on the skin. In June Wimbledon recorded 112F (surely not- must be […] Read more

    The olive groves were silent, the blue sea rolled below, still  queasy after the night’s storm and no one was around as I walked around Patrick Leigh Fermor’s  house absorbing the atmosphere and trying to find traces of the late writer’s presence. Although I couldn’t see into his garden, I managed to get […] Read more

Everything is rotten in the state of India, but maybe not quite as black and white as it sometimes looks to the returning native. We can only blame ourselves for our lazy, laid back, class ridden, caste riddled, feudal, corrupt, filthy society. The rupee has fallen by 20 percent (incompetent management at the top), investors […] Read more