Category: Wednesday’s Child

I have never hidden my impecuniousness from the gentle reader, indeed I have flaunted it on occasion.  And I do so again now, because otherwise the image I’m about to conjure up – with me on the deck of a large yacht, champagne glass in hand, exchanging pleasant inconsequentialities with the other guests – would reflect badly on the reputation of Wednesday’s Child.  This kind of story only makes sense if the narrator is poorer than the proverbial church mouse, and yes, I qualify.  I’m as poor as Browning’s “ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned,” if you remember...

Events of the week gone by have rent me in twain, with tears of impotence and helpless laughter contending for preeminence.  The tears came from watching the Kevlar-clad armada of Putin’s private army, known euphemistically as the National Guard, stomping on women and children in the center of Moscow.  Trust me, I’m not a claret-swilling sentimentalist who blubbers at the sight of roadkill.  Moreover, I’ve seen as much footage of police brutality in France, in Germany, and in the U.S. as the next guy.  But this was different. Probably like the gentle reader, I have in my mind a composite...

I often think that when the devil was designing his snares, he fretted about the most basic things like increased efficiency, ease of operation, and mass appeal.

Now to Agrigento, nay, to the selfsame hallowed spot where our Foundation’s eponymous helmsman passed the better part of last winter.  The annual weekend of mulberry picking was upon us, with tubs of pure grain spirit wherever you looked – the better to preserve the foragers’ prize in the cold months to come – and white shirts splattered with the fruit’s arterial blood, crimson as the famous Kensington Gore stage prop. As the day’s harvest was jarred and dinner drew near, a remarkable spectacle unfolded.  The people in a house next door harbor a multitude of cats – perhaps as...

I hate to sound like the sort of monomaniacal bore at a cocktail party who will only talk to you about the regrettable slump in hedgehog hospital funding, but really, this is important.  The other week, in a post entitled “Anti-Homestead Acts,” I touched on the news that the ogres in the Kremlin are using tax law to alienate an already starving populace from the tiny kitchen garden plots of land on which the subsistence of millions of Russians, particularly the elderly, had been depending since the 1990’s.  Now, as if such a thing were possible, there comes yet more...

A hundred years from now historians will doubtless scratch their heads over the news that the West’s only audible rebuttal to Moscow’s mendacity in Osaka has come from a notorious invert.  Sir Elton John has found Vladimir Putin’s argument against Western “liberalism” unconvincing, because to him the word means, above all, open practice of homosexuality. Most other people, however – those, as it were, without an axe to grind – cheered the father of Slavic nations from Oslo to Timbuktu, which was understandable in that it was them, rather than Sir Elton and his niche audience of degenerates, that his...

We are just over midsummer’s day and now well into what British journalists, before they dumbed down, used to call the silly season.  So I am nostalgically drawn to make a lighthearted offering of a post, one wherein I essentially propose to the gentle reader a fun yet civilized way to dispose of a lazy afternoon.  Odd being proposed that by a curmudgeon, but there you are. In 1930 a Neapolitan by the name of Rodolfo Falvo wrote the music to the words of another Neapolitan, Enzo Fusco, and the indubitably Neapolitan song that came of the collaboration is called...

The rationale behind “collectivization,” which the great liar is known to have admitted in a private conversation with the British ambassador to Moscow as having caused ten million deaths, was simple.  Stalin wanted every man in his country to be dependent on the state, and a man with even a kerchief-sized plot of land is independent of the state insofar as he can keep himself and his family alive by growing potatoes and cabbages on it

A friend staked me of a drunken night at one of my erstwhile gambling haunts here, with the happy outcome that I leave London tomorrow with the guinea equivalent of half a year’s Wednesday’s Child remuneration in my pocket. Everything suddenly looks rosy, including the overhead lights in the political casino that is England at the moment. Burke wrote of John Law’s reforms that they had turned France into one giant gaming table, and looking at the morning’s newspapers an observer can hardly hide from the analogy even if he is not a casino habitué. Here are the latest odds...