Category: PG Wodehouse

The Beagle Has Landed

Not all the news is bad. There was an item in The Guardian this week noting that the urban bird population is increasing and is more diverse because of the popularity of bird feeders charged with nutritious and tempting food.

Out to Lunch

“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like “What about lunch?” (AA Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh) 

The Dragon Book of Verse

The Dragon Book of Verse was first published in 1935. The introduction to my (1937) edition was the property of Leighton Park School in Reading; a Quaker school founded in 1890. The Introduction explains that it is divided into two Books.

A Good Gossip

I’m reading The Journals of Kenneth Rose in small doses, not because they are heavy going; they are highly readable; there are aperçus on every page and they deserve to be savoured.

High Treason

Is it too soon to digress? Don’t muddle High Toast with High Treason; the former an agreeably astringent snuff but the latter is also to be taken seriously. In ‘the good old days’, the existence of which is very doubtful, the usual punishment for dabbling in the latter was hanging, drawing and quartering.

Lush Places

The title is an homage to William Boot’s column in The Beast (vide Scoop, Evelyn Waugh, 1933). Whether it is mild weather or competition from feeders in the cemetery, our avian amigos are not making their way, ‘feather footed through the plashy fen’, to the feeders in the back garden.

All About The Income Tax

An agreeable aspect of living in New York in 1983 was not paying UK tax. I was not there long enough to be liable to US tax either. By 1989, when I was in Singapore, this tax holiday had been abolished. I would have had to stay for more than a year. Worse, the Singapore… Continue reading All About The Income Tax

Jeeves in Japan

Why are the Japanese obsessed with butlers? Kazuo Ishiguro’s Man Booker winner in 1989, The Remains of the Day, has a butler as its central character.