Sam Redlark

Below is a response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 12th June 2022. The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use. ~ At what age do we become capable of love? image generated by Craiyon “Our next door neighbour is the London Underground,” said Ann Cromack, as she led me, at a brisk pace, through the labyrinthine sub-basement of the British Museum. “We share a common wall with the Central Line,” she clarified, inserting a key into the lock of Room 45, which is also known as 'The Temple of Aphrodite'. The name conjures images of Doric columns, bleached by the glare of the Mediterranean sun; a far cry from the disquieting reality of wall-to-wall cabinets, filled from top to bottom with disembodied arms - rendered mostly in marble, many missing fingers - all la...

image generated by Craiyon Below is a response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 19th June 2022 The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use. ~ Why do we eat pudding last? As a young girl, my grandmother, along with her mother and father, her four brothers, a St Bernard who monopolised the hearth during the winter, and an African grey parrot named Joey, all occupied a cramped bungalow, that was situated towards the end of an unmade road, in Thundersley. The road remained unpaved until the late 1990s, by which time the house had long been demolished, and many of its former occupants had been interred in the terraced churchyard at St Mary's, a couple of residential streets away. Periodically, I am called upon by the church to attend to family gravestones that have...

image generated by Craiyon I wrote two responses to this query, both very different. I don't know why. Boredom, perhaps. ~ How much does it cost to change the British monarch? The minor bell-tower protruding like a chimney stack, from the south-eastern corner of the church of St Lidwina's, chimes the half-hour past noon. In response, the Royal Mint dutifully exhales a torrent of lunchtime workers through the embedded architecture of its main entrance – a former railway arch connecting to the bowed semi-ribs of the archways that once stood their ground on either side, before they were partially demolished and absorbed into the newer building. In that strange way in which the Capital will periodically reinvent itself, what was once a conduit for incoming and outgoing rail freight is now a pedestrianised gateway for the base coin of that wealth. Many of the workers choose to settle, like a flock of London pigeons, on a nearby triangular road island with rounded corners. A few yea...

image generated by Craiyon This is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 26th June, 2022. The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site. I am replying here instead because it is too good a writing exercise to give up: How quickly can you go from a prompt, a blank mind, and a blank page to a finished piece? And how good can you make it? This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use. ~ This piece was written prior to the death of Queen Elizabeth II How much does it cost to change the British monarch? In July, 1964, Ronald Wren found himself deposed from what he had regarded as a secure position within the civil service, following the internal restructuring of his department. “'Curtailment' is how they referred to it,” he recalls. As a man in his mid-40s, whose work expe...

image generated by Craiyon Below is a response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on the 3rd July, 2022. The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use.   ~ My Christmas present from Ethel Luff (a mug bearing the image of a kitten entangled it's own unravelled DNA code) arrived garnished with a section of Olympic-grade gymnastic ribbon. “I'm retiring” she announced, when we spoke in person a couple of months later, though she used a stronger turn of phrase. “Well, I retired over two decades ago, but now, if anyone asks me for a demonstration, I can say with all honesty that I no longer have the equipment. No more pushing the settees up against the wall and prancing around on the shagpile, with all my bits flopping about, for the benefit of the magpie-eyed Hampstea...

image generated by Craiyon Below is a response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 10th July, 2022 The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use.   ~ Why is listening to music pleasant? I find that, as I get older, certain pieces of music merge with my internal biography and are thereafter inseparable from these points in space and time. The great unseen labour of my life has been a constellation of brief, yet potent, memories that can be rekindled by the right configuration of notes and vocal melodies. A neurologist in possession of the wherewithal to observe this process as it unfolds, might observe the crude foundational outline of a human soul staked out in architecture of a living brain. The memories evoked are bittersweet: The knowledge that I was ther...

Below is a response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 17th July 2022. The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use. ~ Which species exhibits the most diverse physical characteristics? image generated by Craiyon In the summer of 1976, Victor Wijngaarden, on holiday with his family in Cawdale, North Yorkshire, ran from the back door of the house that his parents rented for two weeks every June or July, to a nearby stretch of river. In his hands he clutched a bamboo pole, holding it across his chest as if it were a rifle, and he a solider charging across no-man's land, with the red fishing net at one end substituting for a bayonet. His heart was set on the tiny black fish that he had observed, during previous years, moving in procession upstream, each migratory c...

image generated by Craiyon Below is a response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on the 24th July 2022 The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use. ~ What qualities should we look for in a leader? Recently, Walter Searle sent me (and I would imagine others in his email address book) a Warhol-esque montage of the outgoing British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, suffering from what he referred to as “tie wilt”. “Whenever he deigns to wear a neck tie, it inevitably comes to resemble a weed that has been strangled by the gardener who attempted to uproot it,” he added, by way of commentary. I am unsure what he meant to achieve with this observation, beyond adding to an expansive list of competencies where Johnson has fallen lamentably short. It actually rather depressed me,...

Below is a response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on the 31st July 2022 The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use. Is running up and down a hill better for you than running on the flat? image generated by Craiyon You may have visited those northernmost fringes of Scotland that scatter like biscuit crumbs across the page of an atlas; where, under the aloof gaze of a cartographer, the North Sea fuses seamlessly with the Atlantic Ocean. Whilst there, you may have unknowingly laid eyes upon Michael Fairbairn as he hobbled through the winding, flat-cobbled streets of Greencliff, leaning on a cane for support like a man two-times his age. You would have caught him on his weekly round trip to and from the small supermarket with its ageing fleet of 15 trolleys, that we...

Below is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 14th August, 2022 The comment has since been deleted from the website. This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use. ~ What are the fewest separate foods you could eat and still have a healthy, balanced diet? image generated by Craiyon For as long as I have known Lorna Swash, she has worn her hair in the style of a 1970s social worker: Cut shoulder-length using the kitchen scissors, with a dark listless fringe in need of shampoo, framing a round face, that is prominently dimpled with a pair of rosy cheeks, and drawn into a chin that is too small and incongruous with her other features. For five years it was ridiculously easy to pick her out in a crowd: Just look for the faded red anorak with the detachable sleeves. I never saw her take it off, even during in the h...

image generated by Craiyon Below is my final response to the weekly Notes & Queries series that appears on The Guardian newspaper website, every Sunday, at around 2pm. It is described by the paper as a “long-running series that invites readers to send in questions and answers on everything from trivial flights of fancy to the most profound concepts.” I do not expect my comment to appear on the site. When I posted it, my account had been placed in a state of pre-moderation – a fence-sitting, but ultimately cowardly, means of censorship by stealth. Ordinarily on the site, if a comment is submitted and then subsequently removed by the jannies, a bookmark will remain, informing readers that the post was deleted for violating community standards. If an account is under pre-moderation and a comment is not approved by the jannies, then no such marker will appear. It will be as if the contribution never existed, and as if the writer never participated in the conversation. On a website t...

image generated by Craiyon Tragically the slo-mo drug from the film 'Dredd' has got its hooks into the jannies who moderate The Guardian website. They can now only delete comments several days after they were posted. We wish them a speedy recovery and hope that their powers of censorship will eventually return to normal speed. Those wishing to read my belatedly-erased contribution to a discussion regarding the outer limits of eyelash growth may find it below. ~ There was a time when turning the page on a redundant chapter in your life was as easy as leaving your job at the textile mill, casting off the name chosen for you by your parents (in this case 'Margaret Jacklin') like it was a set of clothes that no longer fit you properly, and prancing seductively onto the stage of a theatre in another town to perform under the moniker 'Flapper Marrow.' Later, after the naked spectacle of vaudeville had lost some of its lustre, and the giddiness of freedom had resettled...