CHRISTMAS 1877. At St-Leonards-on-Sea, in the English county of Sussex, a Christmas market was being held in the ‘old town’. The shops and churches were decorated with laurel, holly and ivy. Nevertheless, perhaps due to the unseasonable mild weather, the jollity of the Hastings & St Leonards
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A HOUSE BY THE THAMES In 1996 my husband Rob and I bought a holiday house on an 18th century estate called Harleyford, by the banks of the River Thames in Buckinghamshire. For the next fifteen years we divided our time between England and Australia. Originally we
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DEATH BY THE RIVER THAMES Walkers along the Thames Path should take a break at the village of Cumnor, otherwise reached by car via the A420 from Oxford. In the 14th century the monks of Abingdon Abbey built Cumnor Hall, scene of a mysterious death in the
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AN EARLY ‘STAMP’ OF STUPIDITY At the age of seven I decided to become a stamp collector. In a generous act of encouragement I was given a stamp album assembled over many years by an older cousin. I cut out the largest and most exotic of his
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AUSSIE HISTORY ALONG THE THAMES For Australians exploring the River Thames there are places of particular interest. When my partner Rob and I walked the Path we found lots of Aussie associations. On the upper reaches of the river is the village of Buscot, and the National Trust owned Buscot
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Blood On My Boots was one of the titles I considered for my book on the Thames Path. I love social history , especially murder mysteries, and many bodies have ended up in the river. The book was eventually published as All Along the River;
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LAWS OF LINGUISTICS In Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, chief protagonist Jude Fawley naively assumes that learning a foreign language is like cracking a code; that mastering two or three words will miraculously provide the key to understanding the entire vocabulary. Hardy refers to this as Grimm’s
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APOLOGIES IN ADVANCE, THIS STORY IS A BIT COMPLICATED! When St John’s church at Parramatta (New South Wales) was being remodelled circa 1817, Elizabeth Macquarie offered some advice to the project’s architect, Lieutenant John Watts (1786-1873). In 1895 Watts’ daughter, Mrs Margaret Elizabeth Bagot wrote; ‘Mrs Macquarie
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UPDATE – THURSDAY, MARCH 9 2023; THE PIEMAN’S GRAND JETE! Just imagine the Flying Pieman (William Francis King) as the ‘star’ of a ballet. This almost came to be. In 1942 artist Roderick Shaw prepared 21 watercolours for a proposed ballet to be called; ”The Flying Pieman
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Browsing through images of paintings relating to early Sydney at the city’s Mitchell Library, I came across a striking portrait of an Aborigine. His eyes seemed to reflect all the pride and sorrow of his people. He was
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