John Baker’s Blog

The place was a first-floor restaurant within a department store. I was seated at the window overlooking an open square and the queue for the Viking Museum. The coffee was served in tiny stainless-steel pots and I drank it black and watched the people in the queue edging forward for a history lesson.
I’d noticed the [...]

The Guardian’s edited version of “The Other Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair” by Michel Mok, first published in the New York Post, September 25 1936
The author’s wife, Zelda, had been ill for some years. There was talk, said his friends, of an attempt at suicide on her part one evening [...]

I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
Yesterday we saw King Lear with Ian McKellen at the Newcastle Theatre Royal. This is an RSC production, directed by Trevor Nunn and the theatre was packed with anticipation.
Considering [...]

This production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass menagerie was well worth the four-hour train journey to London and back.
I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes failed them, or they had failed [...]