The Wintle Blog

After the proper period of mourning had elapsed, the four chroniclers met in a little chapel in the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, who was, after all, the avatar of wisdom. To inspire their deliberations in other and more sensual ways, their nostrils occasionally caught the fading scent of incense, burning at the High Altar, and they could faintly hear the latest mass being said for the soul of the late Emperor. “He was a great soldier, whose armies drove the barbarians from whole tracts of the old empire,” said the first chronicler. Nearby, a scribe (who was also a slave, and therefore sat on a low stool with his forehead level with the table top) smoothed a piece of parchment on his knees and poised his stylus. “But not from Mother Rome herself,” said the second. “The Empire remains here, at Constantinople, in the Holy City of Byzantium. Savages still desecrate the seven sacred hills.” “Perhaps,” said the third, “for his brave attempt and that sad failure we should call him ‘The ...

Just after the snows had melted, two friends died within a few days of each other. The first to leave us, on January 23, was Noel Wain. I’d met him when he joined The Western Morning News as chief reporter. I was his deputy. Later he became picture editor, and in a final chapter, he cut free and discovered his real vocation as a painter. This is one of his pieces, a painted collage of objects found on a Westcountry beach. It was created in 1989. Four days later, we lost Brian Pedley, whom I knew when he and I were at Television South West, where he was a senior producer, working principally on the evening news magazine. I liked to think that at least in spirit (if not in fact) Brian was descended from that robust line of Westcountry non-conformist radicals, those upright, unbowing dissenters whose stock also produced the late Labour leader Michael Foot, who was, like Brian, one of Plymouth Argyle’s passionate pilgrims. Brian was a master of popular TV journalism, a to...

Yes, yes, I know 1975 was the year of the last great EU referendum, but that same Summer my good friend Graham Ball (himself a scion of Southend-on-Sea) barged into my house clutching a vinyl LP called Down by the Jetty and pushed past me to the record player (a Pioneer PL-12D wired to  a pair of Wharfedale Dentons) crying “listen to this, listen to this,” and introduced me to Dr Feelgood. So in the week when Wilko Johnson (Feelgood guitarist, nearest to you) announced his farewell tour – farewell because he also announced, with dignity, wisdom, and measured wit that he was dying - I find I don’t really care much about Mr Cameron’s forthcoming referendum; or only insofar as the event might fulfil the promise of an entertainment suggested in these lines from Marx: “Hegel says somewhere that  great historic events occur twice. He forgot to add: 'once as tragedy, and again as farce'.” I do care about Wilko, though, who was also a philosopher and historian , and I car...