Simon Howard's personal blog about stuff
In 2023, 2024 and 2025, I used my New Year’s Day post to count things. There are only so many times I can recycle an idea, so this may be the end of the road, but here are 25 numbers about my life in 2025, in descending numerical order. Wendy and I took 3,625 photos […]
This was the first of Anne Tyler’s many novels that I’ve picked up, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. As it turned out, I found it to be a gentle, closely observed, and quietly moving book. Tyler takes the narrow frame of a wedding weekend and uses it to reflect on far broader […]
This is Hexham Bridge, which has been crossing the Tyne for 232 years: longer even than it takes to cross the Tyne Bridge at rush hour with the current ongoing restoration work. Hexham Old Bridge, this bridge’s predecessor-but-one, lasted only a year, swept away in the Great Tyne Flood of 1771. Its replacement last only […]
This is Molly: unveiled on the banks of the Wear earlier this year, the statue commemorates the women who kept Sunderland’s shipyards running during the World Wars. She was sculpted by Ron Lawson. Shipbuilding was a continuous occupation on Wearside for about seven centuries, until the last shipyard closed in 1988. It perhaps lends an […]
In my day job, I am the successor to the District Medical Officer referred to in this notice pinned to a wall in an early 1900s school at Beamish. The list has expanded, though everything on the Beamish list is more or less still on the list today, though not always in quite the same […]
With Air, John Boyne brings his quartet of elemental novellas to a close, and it feels like a strong, fitting conclusion—though I was a little sad to finish the series. Like the others, Air is an easy book to read in terms of pace and prose, yet it has serious things to say about how […]
I recently walked past Leith Library which is almost a century old. I did not expect to later discover that, in 1976, an elephant popped in: This photo is courtesy of The Scotsman, 15 January 1976, where it is reported that: Indras, a five-year old female elephant now appearing in a circus at Leith Theatre, […]