Hobbies and Interests

Romanesque Sculpture

I am really interested in Romanesque Sculpture (or more properly Anglo-Norman Sculpture), a fascination which started in 1966 when I briefly lived in the small village of Pipe Aston in Shropshire where the church has an interesting Anglo-Norman tympanum of the Herefordshire School.

When I was studying in London, I was privileged to meet Dr George Zarnecki,  who kindly loaned me his unpublished PhD thesis to read.

I intend to put information and pictures of  Anglo-Norman scupture of this page in the future

Gardening

I love gardening, though I know very little about it. I like to have flowers in the garden all the year round, and prefer a flower to look pretty, smell gorgeous, have a long flowering season, and require a minimum amount of work.

Croquet

I always enjoyed playing croquet in a rather random ad hoc kind of way with various friends who had a bit of grass and the necessary equipment. When i lived in Shropshire, I played regular friendly games with Mr Small and his family. Unfortunately, I was not able to play much until my recent retirement. Now I have joined the Colchester Croquet Club and can play fairly regularly, if not very well.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Another of my enduring interests in Geoffrey Chaucer, perhaps the greatest poet, after Shakespeare, in the English language. I 'did' The Nun's Priest's Tale for O Level, and, surprisingly, really enjoyed it. Later I was fortunate to be able to attend the lectures of Norman Davis on Early Middle English Verse and Prose when I was studying at Oxford, which was a great help and spur to my Chaucer studies.

I greatly enjoyed giving a Cambridge University Extra Mural course on "The World of Geoffrey Chaucer". Inspired originally by reading Terry Jones' book "Chaucer's Knight", and subsequent correspondence with the author, I attempted to write verse 'translations' of much of the Prologue and other sections of the Canterbury Tales, which was intended to reflect the work of contemporary scholarship which had not been available to Coghill. It remains incomplete, and was only good in parts.