People have written that, in Dickens' books, London is a character in its own right. London interacts with other characters, and moves the story forward.
That being the case, it makes absolute sense that people would want to visit the locations associated with the books.
‘Dickensland’ is an entertaining tour of such sites…whether they are real or fake.
Finished reading: Dickensland by Lee Jackson 📚
I quite enjoyed Last One Laughing, but I think it’s more like very good Reality TV than it is like good comedy
I found this today - there’s a good list of ‘additional resources’ for Pester on the website:
Elizabeth Frink’s Walking Madonna, and the big, old church
I wasn’t keen on Persuader, but I enjoyed the latest Reacher season, which was based on it
SPOILER: ending of the Old Curiosity Shop
In his letters Dickens spoke both about breaking his heart over the ending of the Old Curiousity shop, and about “committing Nell-icide”
So Kobo says the book here is a Child’s History of England but the cover says it’s a Tale of Two Cities
More interesting, I’m fairly sure that the painting is the end of Castle Street in Salisbury
It would’ve been a different story if one of the Cities had been Salisbury. I’d like to have read it.
Searching websites from the Edge address bar
I didn’t know you could set up site searches in Edge. I assume it’s the same in Chrome, Chromium etc.
You do it as follows.
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go to Settings
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in the search do ‘Manage Search Engines’
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fill in the form as below
The easy way to get the URL is to go to the site you want to set up a search for and do a search. Copy the URL you end up on, and replace your search term with %s
I dunno if I’d use this for lots of websites…but it’s particularly handy for work-environment wiki and trouble-ticket systems
I’m a bit nervous out this one ⚽ #LegChe
Top bins, the spider's web, where the owls sleep and Declan Rice
I’m obviously hoping that Real beat Arsenal 4-0 back at the Bernabeu, but I enjoyed the different descriptions of where Declan Rice put his free kicks
“My old goalkeeper coach at West Ham, Ludek Miklosko, used to call that top corner of the goal next to the stanchion ‘the spiders’ web'. When I worked on an England game with John Murray for BBC Radio 5 Live last month, he said that in Brazil they call it ‘where the owls sleep’. Every country has a different saying for it - we know it as ‘top bins’.”
Malcolm Tucker on the Cramps
Our influences were Bowie, Talking Heads and the Cramps, who were like a voodoo-swamp version of the Munsters
There’s a very brief window between me understanding how something works and me forgetting how it works
In the UK Liz Truss has become a byword for economic disaster
She might be quite pleased that she’ll likely be replaced as such by Donald Trump
I knew you could install Chrome extensions in Edge...but I didn't know how.
- click on the extension button…which looks like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, then
- Manage Extensions, then
- switch the switch for ‘Allow extensions from other stores.’, then
- do a search, then when it can’t find the extension in the Edge store…
- click on the Chrome Web Store link
You could just use Chrome instead….but for reasons I can no longer remember, I prefer Edge
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/139254/2025/screenshot-2025-04-03-171141.png" width=“600” height=“321” alt=“A browser tab displays the Extensions page of Microsoft Edge with no search results found for “po” and a prompt to get extensions.">
I’ve been looking at Obsidian,but I’m going to stick with Joplin for note-taking because, if you’ve already got cloud storage, synchronizing is free and very, very easy
The old castle at sundown this evening
The truth of the Marine Le Pen story is simple. She mucked* around. She got found out.
Ian Dunt explains the coverage of Marine Le Pen’s conviction. He doesn’t really use the word ‘mucked’.
Want to know how Trump gets in. Just look at the coverage of Le Pen
Podcast episodes I enjoyed in March - Pat Nevin, the Irishness of Kate Bush, Nazi sterilizations, Mike Leigh, Nicholas Parsons, Naomi Klein, ice cream, the Taj Mahal, Boy George, Oliver Cromwell, and Lenny Henry's influence on Theresa May and Caitli
Word In Your Ear - Pat Nevin - “Pat Nevin has musical memories even better than scoring a diving header against Arsenal”….a sentence that could keep Socrates, Plato, and every phone-in host on every radio station busy for years
BBC Witness History - Nazi Eugenics - horrific, tragic and weirdly banal. A tough listen. “In July 1933, Adolf Hitler passed a law requiring the sterilisation of Germans with physical and mental disabilities. Helga Gross was one of those sterilised.”
Word in your ear - Nick Duerden’s talked to 50 pop stars about life when the big time’s behind you - Eddie Tenpole-Tudor (of the Swords of a Thousand Men, and Who Killed Bambi) got down to a shortlist of two for the Richard E. Grant role in Withnail and I
Give Kate Bush back to the Irish - Kate Bush is judged to score 9.5 on the Irish-o-meter
This Cultural Life - Mike Leigh - on the night of the second or third repeating of Abigails Party, the weather was dreadful, a strike had taken out ITV, and BBC2 was showing something ‘very esoteric’. 16 million people therefore watched Mike Leigh’s show
BBC - Political Thinking with Nick Robinson - The Theresa May One - the former PM relates how hearing Lenny Henry changed her mind about the Windrush scandal. Henry was giving a speech at a memorial for Stephen Lawrence and he said that the Windrush people had to produce four pieces of documentation for every year they had been in the UK
BBC - This Cultural Life - Caitlin Moran - aged 13, Caitlin Moran somewhat optimisitically applied for the job of Managing Director of Comic Relief. Lenny Henry replied “You wouldn’t want to be MD of Comic Relief, it’s really boring, but I’m sure you will fly like a comet through British society’’”. Moran says she lost the letter but knows it off by heart
Hancocks Half Hour - The Blood Donor - perfect, in my opinion
That Reminds Me - Nicholas Parsons - originally the host of Just A Minute was going to be Jimmy Edwards, but he was unavailable when the pilot was recorded
WTF with Marc Maron - Naomi Klein - “conspiracy culture often seems like it’s anti-establishment…its a gift to the establishment”
BBC Radio 4 - Archive on 4 - Scoop - Mr Whippy ice cream was based on the American Mr Softy. Mrs Thatcher didn’t invent either
This Cultural Life - Jarvis Cocker - Jarvis Cocker says that the lady in Common People is not the wife of the Greek Finance Minister
Linda Smith’s A Brief History of Timewasting - I’ve only heard one of these but it was very funny. There was a great line from Margaret John (Doris from Gavin and Stacey) to the effect that if life was a Countdown puzzle then she’s in the bibbedy-bibby-boo bit rather than the boom-diddy-boom bit. Or words to that effect.
Cardew ‘The Cad’ Robinson? Comedy’s great lost heroes remembered by Robert Ross - The Word in your Ear podcast - lovely chat about old semi-forgotten comedians, like Roy Jay, the “Spook Spook Slither Hither” chap. The podcast / book needs to be a multi-part BBC4 series
EP99: Yoon Suk Yeol–The Hated and the Dead - South Korean presidents can only serve one term. Not having any prospect of re-election seems to be a bad thing
Dave Rimmer’s classic Culture Club book is republished. Boy George hated it “as it was all true” - Word in Your Ear - Culture Club split their songwriting royalties equally, like U2 and REM
History Extra - Great Reputations - Oliver Cromwell - Oliver Cromwell’s was voted the 10th ever Greatest Briton in a poll in 2002. I guess ‘great’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘good’?
A short history of the Taj Mahal - the poet Rabindranath Tagore described the Taj as ‘a teardrop on the cheek of time’
I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m planning on having an Awesome April