Julius Caesar got himself captured by pirates and held for ransom when he was twenty-five. Before you feel sorry for him, this was a fairly common practice at the time (75 BCE). His captors required a ransom of 20 talents of silver (about $600,000 in today’s value).
THE TRAIL BENEATH THE YEARS
(Farewell to Africa)
It was when the grind and grumble,
Of those wagons passed this way,
The colour-sergeant’s bark was never meek,
The sighing strain of steel,
That was bound fast to the wheel,
Was melody to rumble and to squeak.
Death and Transfiguration is neither poem nor soliloquy. The hour of midnight had long struck when my thoughts asked the question, what is it like to die? I was alone, the background to my whimsical notions was Richard Strauss’s musical-poem, “Death and Transfiguration”.
Saint David’s Day (Welsh: Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant or Dydd Gŵyl Dewi or the Feast of Saint David, is the feast day of Saint David, the patron saint of Wales, and falls on 1 March, the date of Saint David’s death in 589 AD. The feast has been regularly celebrated since the canonisation of David in the 12th century, by Pope Callixtus II, though it is not a public holiday in the UK.
Music gained popularity in the intimate nineteenth-century parlour. At the time, home life was centred in the salon, or parlour, where children played and learned with adult supervision, and where the family entertained company.
The arts, literature and poetry, were very important to the peoples of the workers Reich. Literature, poetry and art were the roots through which the folk sustained their unique culture. Immersion in one’s being, experienced through the third eye, is a binding influence on the nation. Warriors, wherever in the world they are posted, know their land and their folk are with them.
Each year, Michael Walsh, the people’s poet, receives thousands of tributes from romantics and he has thousands of social media admirers. You feel as though Michael through her verse embraces you. When you finally place your book down on the bedside table you glow from the effect of his sentiments being in perfect harmony with yours.
We have come a long way since 1960 when the censor’s dead hand was lifted off the D. H. Lawrence novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I am not surprised that distinguished English author first considered calling his literary book Tenderness. The lovemaking between Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper lover Oliver Mellors was sensitively portrayed. The language used was typically rustic without intending to shock.
Although I took my Liverpool working-class roots for granted few others did so. Wherever in the world we ‘Scousers’ went we were feted as celebrities. The Beatles in the 1960s were taking the world by storm. There were many other Liverpool legends like Billy Fury and Charlie Landsborough (Birkenhead) and, of course, Gerry Marsden of the Pacemakers.
In the UK, 500 people sang a folk song at the same time via video link, dedicating an unusual flash mob to the New Year and hopes that all the bad things were left behind.
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