While Vladimir Putin rains death on Ukraine, the former Armageddon factory of Orford Ness has been reinvented in favour of life.
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it’s a big lump of rock and it’s very English (old-fashioned cafes and lots of weather) without quite being England. A place to blow a trumpet to your heart’s content and see life from a wry angle.
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On the A35 just east of Bridport in Dorset the hubcap of a Skoda marked the spot where the future King Charles almost lost the plot. On the run, with a price on his head, he decided on the spur of the moment to hang a left up a road called Lee Lane. Good move …
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This outpost of England – shrinking, shapeshifting – is eerie and beautiful, with vivid green fields unrolling to frangible cliffs and empty beaches. Not to everyone’s taste maybe, but its otherworldliness casts a spell on some.
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Some detectorists will tell you that the holy grail of metal detecting is a hoard of Roman coins or Anglo-Saxon jewellery. Others will point out – borrowing a line from the TV series Detectorists – that actually the holy grail of metal detecting is the Holy Grail…
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Russell “Rusty” Waughman is 98 years old and describes himself as “just an ordinary bloke”. For 27 years he worked for a packaging company near Kettering and he still lives in the house he bought for “£1,650 with all the extras” in 1956. But for a period of seven months in 1943 and 1944 he inhabited a parallel universe as the pilot and skipper of an Avro Lancaster…
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It’s low tide on the Thames in London. At Rotherhithe on the south bank I descend rickety wooden stairs to a foreshore littered with iron nails and rivets – from the time when the dock here was a site of boatbuilding then of boat breaking.
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Something is missing in the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel – George. That’s the name of a shrunken head from Peru which I remember seeing in the Smoke Room a decade ago. It’s just as well it’s gone – such a grisly trophy had surely outlived its shock value – but it’s also a surprise. To quote the Talking Heads song the PyG is a Heaven “where nothing/Nothing ever happens.”
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Beale St in Memphis, Tennessee is the musical heart of America, a neon gulch of juke joints and music halls where Delta blues found Elvis and rock 'n' roll resulted. But for the city of Memphis this beautiful accident is overshadowed by a darker legacy.
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Did he ever feel frightened? Alang Bay, an impish-looking 85-year-old, looked puzzled. It was a stupid question. “No! When the Americans see me they shit in their trousers and run away!” Mr Bay is a Vietnamese war hero.
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The clues are there for anyone to see - the piles of red rubble on the beaches, the big bones scattered along one section of shoreline - but nobody in the Canadian fishing village of Red Bay had thought to put them together.
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This is how fate works. Hugh Aynesworth was a 32-year-old reporter with the Dallas Morning News when President John F Kennedy came to town on November 22, 1963. That morning, feeling miffed that he wasn't assigned to cover the story,
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It was nearly midnight in downtown Dallas. As we crossed Dealey Plaza on Elm Street the taxi driver braked sharply - 'This is where the first bullet hit' - then floored the accelerator, whipped us round on to Stemmons Freeway and headed for Parkland Memorial Hospital at 80 miles an hour.
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The ten whirring ceiling fans made little impact on the humid air, which felt as sludgy as the bottom of an espresso cup. It was the live music that sliced through the torpor. The Casa de la Trova in Santiago de Cuba is steeped in the troubadour traditions that gave the world son…
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