Journal

I prefer the old-fashioned word to the commonly used abbreviation – blog, from web-log. My journal is made up of occasional observations on things that interest me. Strictly speaking, a journal is a daily record, but it’s not every day that something worth writing about happens. Every other week at best, or just occasionally. Come back once a month and I will do my best to make sure that you find something new.

Latest Post

Coming up for air

Dec 5, 2023

My wife and I, especially my wife, Jaspreet Mander, have been preoccupied for the last two weeks with Writing On Air, the annual festival of new writing run by Chapel FM, our local community radio station. This year we contributed between us 5% of the entire programme, four out of eighty, over the two weekends of the festival.

My contribution was a dramatised reading of a short story called Bicycle Thief, which I wrote a few years ago and which just happened to fit the theme of this year’s Writing On Air, ‘Missing’. A boy called Timothy, bored in the summer holidays with nothing to do at home, goes for a bike ride for which his mother provides him with a picnic. It is while he is eating his picnic in a field that his bicycle goes missing.

The other three quarters of our combined contribution came from the Mander half of the Rathmander writing co-operative, Anita and Aunty Ji, Raavi and A Delicate Proposal.

Jaspreet, who is Punjabi, formerly a lecturer in English at Punjabi University, Patiala, now officially an NRI (Non-Resident Indian), found inspiration for two of them in memories of her home in Punjab. Her ‘Delicate Proposal’ however is addressed to Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran. Her friends in India think she has taken a big risk with this and have warned her that a fatwah is bound to follow.

My inspiration comes, entirely without risk, from my childhood in the West Riding.

Links

Bicycle Thief: https://www.chapelfm.co.uk/elfm-player/archive/2023/11/bicycle-thief

Anita and Aunty Ji: https://www.chapelfm.co.uk/elfm-player/archive/2023/11/anita-and-aunty-ji/

Raavi:https://www.chapelfm.co.uk/elfm-player/archive/2023/11/raavi-river-of-two-punjabs

A Delicate Proposal: https://www.chapelfm.co.uk/elfm-player/archive/2023/11/a-delicate-proposal-to-mr-khamenei

Jerusalem Street

Nov 21, 2023

Down at the end of Jerusalem Street There's a butcher's shop selling cuts of meat Wrapped in cloth so white and neat You'd think it was really a winding sheet. So many parcels! Enough for a feast! Shoulder and loin, belly and feet, Heads to boil, legs to roast, Fresh...

First Folio Day

Nov 13, 2023

Shakespeare, Shakespeare, nothing but Shakespeare, as we celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the First Folio. In other words the first complete works, published in 1623 by Blount & Jaggard, prepared for publication by his old friends, John Heminges and...

The antidote to Cities of Culture

Oct 31, 2023

The city of Leeds lost out in its bid to be European Capital of Culture 2023, disqualified by Britain's decision to leave the EU. Meanwhile, its neighbour, Bradford, has been chosen to be UK City of Culture 2025. Licking its wounds, Leeds (or rather Leeds City Council...

The charm of folly

Oct 20, 2023

Most people who consider themselves to be well-read have read Thomas More's Utopia, but few have read his friend Erasmus's book, Praise of Folly. Until a fortnight ago, I belonged to the Utopian majority, familiar with his friend's name only because it has been in the...

Infantilising the nation

Sep 21, 2023

I have begun to wonder whether the government has conspired with the BBC to infantilise the nation. Participants in television programmes are encouraged to behave like children, jumping up and down, waving their arms about, hugging each other. Men, even very old men,...

No clapping please, we’re mindful

Sep 5, 2023

Last week's 'Mindfulness Prom' was a quiet affair. The music was all lento and pianissimo. Just when clapping between movements has begun to be permitted, if only at the Proms, the audience for this concert listened in total silence. There were times when I had to...

They did it my way

Aug 14, 2023

It was July 1971. The 1967 'summer of love' was a fading memory. I had been at Cambridge then, where male students out-numbered females by at least ten to one and a summer of love was something that few of us could aspire to. Instead, studying for a degree in English...

There’s something about a pub

Jul 19, 2023

There's something about a pub that loosens the tongue, sloughs off inhibition, turns the tide of imagination. How many novels, plays and poems have been conceived in a pub? How many ideas hastily scribbled down? How many hitherto unnoticed faults revealed when a draft...

A poem

Jul 7, 2023

THE WRECK OF THE PIGEON days and nights of high wind driven at high tide across the garden strait into the brick walls of ancient privies the land-locked bird drops stunned breathless sinks lifeless lies washed up on dry land early in the morning through the bedroom...

AI or AI?

Jun 29, 2023

Striking Hollywood writers fear AI will write them out of the script. Hollywood writers say they are fighting to keep their work in human hands, fearing that artificial intelligence could eventually take their jobs. (CBC News, May 5, 2023) These machines superseded...

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NEIL RATHMELL