“A hum in the drum”: Baby Driver, tinnitus, hearing loss and me
I am very much behind the curve as it was only the other evening that I finally got round to watching Baby Driver. It shouldn’t have taken me so long beca...
Category: Personal
The Great Storm
Today is the thirtieth anniversary of what became known as The Great Storm, which ripped its way across the south-east of England on the night of 15th and 16th ...
The time I met a national treasure
I once, briefly, met actor and national treasure Robert Hardy. He died today, and the first thing I thought of was the fact that his booming voice has been sile...
And that’s the first draft
You will go to the devil, die when you will, you will go to a rare place when you die.[1]Purloined from a real trial that you’ll find out about in Fatal E...
Historian? Author? Writer?
One day, Rebecca Rideal wrote a history book, intended for the general, non-academic reader. You know the type – the sort of person who is interested in h...
Cousin Fred’s garden mausoleum
What I am about to write might surprise you. Or perhaps not, given that it’s written by someone who’s posed with a skull (don’t worry, it wasn...
You don’t need a typewriter to tell a story
It was the mid-80s: Cliff Richard was on telly, our video player was the size of a small family car, my mum had a perm. My dad’s fondness for pictures of ...
Mourning the silence
For five years, I have lived in world of muffled sounds and no silence. It turns out that I have tinnitus, and I have hearing loss in my right ear; for the past...