The best blogs are about making you feel that you aren’t alone in your secret little shame. You read them to feel better about feeding your children toast three times a day, cleaning your bathroom with your dirty knickers or fancying Tyrion Lannister. That kind of thing. This one’s about the books you pretend to […]
A slacker’s guide to Treasure Island
OK, I am not as on track with the Slacker’s Guide than I’d hoped to be. In the same way that only getting half-way up a hill twice does not equal having bagged a Munro, half of Moby Dick plus half of Anna Karenina don’t equal two properly ticked off classics. Ho hum. Maybe […]
Show me the Monets
The shame… “Oh no, madam. The Monets are at Kelvingrove, we’ve got Manets, and Degas and lots of other stuff. But if it’s Monets you want, you’ll need to go elsewhere,” the lady with the badge at the Burrell Collection said gently. But her kindness didn’t soften it, Boy Three’s face fell. We were crushed. […]
Auschwitz: unequal to the task
This weekend we travelled to Poland and visited Auschwitz and Birkenau. I called this post unequal to the task because there’s nothing I can say about the place and what happened there that would come anywhere near doing it justice. But the camp was – horrifically – equal to its hellish task. Astonishingly so. 1.3 […]
National Museum of Scotland – brilliant but too big
Yet another phase of Boy One’s forthcoming 16th birthday took us to Edinburgh and the huge museum on Chambers Street. He’s into history – period irrelevant. Boy Three is doing the Celts at school and he was chuffed. Boy Two is largely interested in dramatic sighs, sneering and eye-rolling, venue irrelevant. And so we set […]