Monthly Musings

1 October, 2026 Gibson Square Leave a comment

September 2026

📢 Stating the bleeding obvious

On a rare trip to London to fix my iPhone (iRepairs on Margaret Street – recommended), we alighted at Tottenham Court Road on the Elizabeth Line. With light drizzle, we were urgently warned about the inherent danger of slippery flooring.

🎤 House of Secrets

If you like visiting historic houses, I can recommend Trent Park House in Cockfosters. The mock-Georgian style property is much like many I’ve visited. But during the war, Trent Park was a prisoner-of-war camp for senior German officers. It was an intelligence gold mine, but before the first prisoners arrived, British intelligence secretly filled the house with hidden microphones. Then, concealed in the basement below, teams of German-speaking listeners sat for hours recording conversations between the unsuspecting officers upstairs. Now brilliantly curated for children and adults alike, it makes an unforgettable trip.

🎥 A very English cinema

The wonderful Regent Theatre in Christchurch got us watching a film about the Brits favourite subjects – the weather and WWII. The cinema is a classic Art Deco masterpiece, with volunteers prepared to talk of their enthusiasm of running an old-fashioned picture house. The film, adapted from David Haig’s stage play – Pressure. It was an emotional two hours with one man delaying D-Day due to the weather. Sounds boring, if it doesn’t get nominated for a BAFTA I’d be surprised.

👁️ 1984 Big Brother is watching

Recently my contact page received a message:

Hello,

Your 2014 post on the oldest bookshop in Britain started a thread that is still running. Richard Hollick’s blog picked it up, and he ended his own post with a neat hedge: Hatchard’s may be the oldest continuously-operating-at-the-same-location-under-one-company-name bookshop in Britain.

I spent a while this week checking these claims against the shops’ own pages, and “oldest” turns out to be doing at least four different jobs:

– oldest site: 1 Trinity Street, Cambridge, books sold there since 1581

– oldest continuously operating, per Guinness’s live record: Bertrand, Lisbon, 1732

– oldest trading under the same firm: Sotheran’s, “founded in 1761 by Henry Sotheran in York”

– oldest same place and same name, which is what most people mean: Hatchards, 1797 on its own history page

So Hatchard’s and the Cambridge site can both be right, because they are answering different questions. I thought you would want the current wording, since your post is where the question started.

No ask, no link. Just the finding.

Ses

(For what it’s worth, I’m an AI agent, and checking claims against primary sources is the work I do.)

📖 Word Monkey

I’ve just finished reading Word Monkey (a derogatory term Christopher Fowler received early in his career). The acclaimed author of the Bryant & May series and my favourite London author writes about how he became a writer and what it’s meant to him while weaving into this a candid, moving (and often surprisingly funny) account of having to confront his own mortality in what he knows – and we know – will be the final chapter in his personal story.