I do love a good dictionary and Dr Johnson remains the master of the genre, three hundred years after he compiled his first such tome. This is why markontour and friends took a short detour to Lichfield on our long drive back to London from the English Lake District, for it was in this little Staffordshire city that Samuel Johnson was born in 1709 and his childhood home has be turned into a lovely museum and bookshop.
Markontour’s first film. Not likely to trouble the box office. But the snow was fun..
The western world’s greatest music festival is over for another year and 2017 was undoubtedly defined by the way that Glastonbury embraced Jeremy Corbyn. I’ve been going to this magical festival for 25 years and have experienced countless ‘Glastonbury moments’, when an entire crowd is moved to euphoria as one under the power of extraordinary musical performance, but I’ve never witnessed anything like this.
Yesterday I visited my local doctor (General Practitioner, or GP, in the British vernacular) about a hypochondria based toe-injury, and got a lesson in psychological medicine.
One of my many short-lived obsessions as a boy was with magic. Not the black arts kind, but the Three Card Trick variety. Apparently my nieces…
Eugene Skeef and the Abantu Ensemble started an extraordinary performance at the British Museum last night with the sound of bird song. Not sampled sparrows, but…
A friend’s older brother took us to see Gil Scott Heron in the back room of a Derby pub in about 1989. I loved his lyrics…
After months of nearly no blogging activity it felt wrong to get going again with a piece about the joy of being in my favourite pub…
Last night I was surprised by The Hague. Not just discovering that what I thought was just the dull home to international criminal courts is actually a thriving beach town, but also by a DJ at The Fat Mermaid who interspersed black-power tracks with Kim Wilde and the Beastie Boys.
It’s not often that I’m pleased when my train or plane is delayed (and I write this while languishing in Luxembourg thanks to a re-routed flight), but had the 16.57 from St Pancras arrived on schedule then I would never have experienced The Sheffield Tap and life would be the lesser.
markontour 