It’s one of the odder ironies of English letters that Sir John Harington, courtier, poet, and godson to Elizabeth I, is remembered not for his verse but for his privy. Not his own privy parts, mind you, but the contraption he nicknamed the ‘Ajax’ - a flushing water-closet that, in its mechanical elegance, promised to … Continue reading The Privy as Polis: Sir John Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax
Tag: Literature
The Man in the Lift
On Being Mistaken for Death Itself, and Other Occupational Hazards Testing the water here and posting an extract from the book I’m writing - be gentle with me. In the 1990s, there was a hospital in the city where I worked that we in the profession referred to, with a kind of grim familiarity, as … Continue reading The Man in the Lift
On the Tyranny of Sameness
“We’ll all be free and we’ll all think alike, as a free people does; and them that don’t won’t be allowed to think different.” What an epigram of our age - though spurious in origin, it speaks truer of our times than many a sanctioned sermon. We needn’t trouble ourselves with the dull bibliographies of … Continue reading On the Tyranny of Sameness
The Draggle-Tail: A Word in Mud and Memory
In truth, the news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination knocked the breath out of me. Over these last twenty four hours I found little appetite to write, or even to stir myself to much at all. I let the hours pass in quiet, trying to steady the heart and unclench the mind. When grief or anxiety … Continue reading The Draggle-Tail: A Word in Mud and Memory
The Forgotten Divinity: On The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
“Great Pan is not dead, but sleeping; and the reed shall sound again at the hour of need.” - Adapted from Plutarch It’s a curious feature of English children’s literature that its most enchanting works are often its most subversive. Carroll slipped logic puzzles and ontological riddles into Alice; Tolkien smuggled Catholic theology into hobbit … Continue reading The Forgotten Divinity: On The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Wording 