In the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is this little, seventeenth-century Dutch painting, A View of Scheveningen Sands, painted by Hendrick van Anthonissen in 1641. Hendrick van Anthonissen, View of Scheveningen Sands, oil on panel, 1641 (prior to conservation); Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. (c) The Fitzwilliam Museum; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation. In 2014, …
I once told the following untruth. During a rambling conversation about football, I informed my boys that Queens Park Rangers FC was founded in by a group of west London pig butchers by appointment to the royal court, and that their original name was Queen’s Pork Rangers. Unbelievably, the tale passed muster. Now this is …
January is awful. It’s cold. It’s miserable. And above all it’s dark. It’s a month when I don’t see daylight at home between Sunday afternoon and Saturday morning. It’s a month when my students get ill and don’t come to class. It’s a month when the next month is February, which, to be perfectly frank, …
When I was young I used to run cross-country. I was part of a great team. We won races. We took home trophies. I was not, however, a great runner. I was the makeweight in a team full of talent. My brother Bill, on the other hand, was a proper sportsman. He played cricket and …
Last night at our house we were watching TV. But this was not old-school, corner-of-the-sitting-room, collective TV. Oh no. This was modern, hand-selected TV, bespoke TV, individually curated for a unique, personal experience. In other words, Susie and I were both tired and both watching catch-up. I was watching the one with the Irish teacher …
When I was small, I didn’t like the dark. It wasn’t that I thought there were monsters lurking; it was a physical thing. I didn’t like the darkness of it, the thickness, the feeling of it closing around me. I didn’t like the unknown silence of it, the quietness into which my own heartbeat might …
Like most English people, I'm excellent at saying sorry. Sorry is almost never the hardest word. It’s a piece of cake. I can do the unnecessary sorry when no-one is upset. I can do the polite sorry that suggests someone else’s fault is my own. I can do the ridiculous sorry which means that something …
In the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge there’s a seventeenth-century Dutch painting of some people walking on a beach. Last year, the painting went to be cleaned and, as she started to remove the old varnish, the conservator, Shan Kuang, noticed something unusual about the surface. It turned out that not only were there people on …
I went out for dinner on Monday night with my three children, Miriam, Esther and Silas. Miriam’s away at university now and Esther heads off in September, so the opportunities for us all to be together are increasingly limited. This dinner was special though, because until my birthday later this month, we are 100 years …
My job is a long way from my home. I consequently spend far too much of my time on public transport. More to the point, I spend far too much of my time on public transport in the dark. Two and a half hours travel at either end of the working day means that for …