Author: Tim Dracup
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Tracy chose this seven-night guided walking holiday with HF Holidays, a company we have used often. The holiday runs several times across the summer season. We had booked on to the first iteration of 2025, hoping to catch Alpine spring flowers in their prime. Arrival We woke at 05:00. Our taxi arrived promptly and, half…
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Dame Penelope Lively was born Penelope Margaret Low in Cairo, Egypt, in 1933, to Roger Low, a bank manager, and Vera, nee Greer. When her parents divorced in 1945, her father sent her to an English boarding school, from which she proceeded to St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she read modern history. Shortly after graduating…
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We returned to the South Downs Way in June 2025, having completed Cocking to Washington at the end of January. Once again we were anxiously monitoring weather forecasts, though this time we were keen to avoid heatwave conditions rather than persistent wind and rain. As it turned out, conditions on our first day were warm…
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Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, at the south-eastern extremity of the Mississippi Delta. The Delta is an alluvial floodplain of some 7,000 square miles, spreading across north-west Mississippi, between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. Welty studied at the Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University before returning…
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It would have been Kate’s 64th birthday on 4 July 2025, had her life not ended in the Princess Alice Hospice on 13 July 2017, shortly after her 56th and final birthday. Every year we make two memorial pilgrimages to the place where we scattered her ashes, on her birthday and on Boxing Day. And…
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Heinrich Böll (1917-85) was born into a Roman Catholic, pacifist family in Cologne, Germany. He was conscripted in 1939, shortly after beginning a degree in German and Philology at the University of Cologne. He served for five years in several countries and was four times wounded. On leaving hospital in August 1944, he tried to…
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This is the sixth in a sequence of twelve monthly posts, each about a piece of music that has personal significance. Each choice is linked, however tenuously, to its immediate predecessor. May’s selection was ‘Saturday Night’ by the Blue Nile (1989), while June’s is ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’ by Ella Fitzgerald (1956). The connection…
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We returned to the Thames Path in mid-May 2025, having completed the section from Pangbourne to Henley in August 2024. We travelled by train and tube to Paddington, from where we caught the 10:08 departure to Twyford, changing there on to a Henley service full of sulky teenagers. Day 1: Henley to Marlow Reaching Henley…
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A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was born Antonia Susan Drabble, the eldest child of a barrister (later a QC) and an academic. One of her younger siblings was the novelist Margaret Drabble (b. 1939). Byatt was born in Sheffield, but the family moved to York to avoid German bombing during WW2. Shortly after graduating from the University…
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We’ve arrived at the fifth in this series of twelve monthly posts dedicated to exploring music of particular personal significance. Each post is connected, however tenuously, to its predecessor and I’m hoping to end in December where I began last January. The series began with Ya Jean by Madilu System, before moving on to Autorail…
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William Keepers Maxwell (1908-2000) edited the New Yorker magazine from 1936 to 1975. He wrote six novels over roughly the same period, the penultimate being The Chateau (1961). Maxwell married a painter called Emily Gilman Noyes (1921-2000) in May 1945. In 1948, three years into their marriage, the couple took a trip to France. He…
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This is the fourth in a series of twelve monthly posts, each exploring a musical composition of profound personal significance. Each choice is connected in some way with its immediate predecessor, although these links may be tenuous because I am inventing them as I go along. I began with Ya Jean by Madilu System –…
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We returned to the Coast Path at the end of March 2025, some nine months after completing the section from Exmouth to Charmouth. We based ourselves in Weymouth for a week, from Saturday to Saturday, reserving 5 Park Mews via cottages.com. This first floor, one-bedroomed holiday let cost £345 plus a £75 refundable security deposit.…
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Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) wrote some twenty novels, ‘The Present and the Past’ (1953) coming relatively late in her career. Her parents were the medical author James Compton-Burnett and his second wife, Katharine. She was the seventh of twelve children: eight girls and four boys. Despite the hyphen, their origins were relatively humble. Home educated until…
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This is the third in a series of posts about music that is personally important to me. I intend to write twelve posts in all – one per month throughout 2025 – each post connected in some way with its predecessor; the final post somehow linked with the first. These connections are being forged as…
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Novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) is best known for ‘Au Rebours’ (Against Nature) (1884), widely regarded as a seminal work in the French Decadent tradition. ‘La-bas’ (The Damned) was published seven years later in 1891. I read the 2001 translation for Penguin Classics by Terry Hale. Huysmans was employed as an administrative civil servant in the…
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We spent the end of February 2025 in England’s Lake District, courtesy of HF Holidays. It was a four-night guided walking holiday. We stayed in the HF country house at Monk Coniston, which is at the northernmost tip of Coniston Water, roughly a mile north-east of the village of Coniston. This was our first HF…
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This is the second in a sequence of posts about music that means a great deal to me. I’ve called the series Ouroboros – the snake with its tail in its mouth – because I’m hoping to finish exactly where I began, with Ya Jean by Madilu System (1993). I hope to write a new…
Eponymous 