STUFF HAPPENS

British film

For unknown reasons the queue has stalled. It is past three in the morning on London’s South Bank and I am sitting in the British Film Institute’s café sipping hot coffee and watching a silent, exquisitely re-coloured film of the Queen’s visit to Pakistan in 1961: there she is laughing as she is asked to […]

by Alex Hickman

For Felix (and his parents)

When I am away making myself, missing you, look to the beech wood on the hill. That bright door through which the deer slips marks my birth. My young years are the shooting green hawthorn, and the beeches – those steepling beeches so handsome and tall and sheltering are my middle and my age. […]

by Alex Hickman

Worth reading: obit of VS Naipaul (written by The Economist, not me)

by Alex Hickman

Worth reading: obit of Jan Morris (written by The Economist not me)

by Alex Hickman

“Do you not see?” – the invisible magic of Nigel Smith

Nigel Smith, devoted family man, industrialist, sailor and hill walker, referendum wonk, devolutionist and electoral reformer was the most influential political campaigner you’ve never heard of. He died suddenly at home in Scotland two weeks ago aged 78, unburdened by establishment honours and with little public attention. The list of those who campaigned alongside Nigel […]

by Alex Hickman

Black and white

While it was going on the decade was entirely ours to describe, one word after another, millions of minute hands hour by hour etching out the character of the island each littoral city, sub-continents. Also, the nature of work in Dublin and Dubai, the unsatisfactory financiers, family life in all its forms the justice of […]

by Alex Hickman

The consolation of community tree planting

I have been planting trees and hedgerows for five years now, and it gives me so much pleasure that by mid-summer I find myself beginning to look forward to cold winter days spent outside armed with a spade, a sack of tree whips and the company of friends and neighbours. I started out in 2014 […]

by Alex Hickman

Obituary, 17 years on

Roddy Scott Compassionate journalist who died filming the Chechens’ forgotten war The Guardian Roddy Scott, who has died aged 31 while filming intense fighting between Chechen rebels and Russian forces in Ingushetia, would have enjoyed the irony that it took the killing of a British journalist to revive international media interest in the ongoing war […]