Danskcolin: Tuesday March 10th 2026 "Don't give up your writing! Even Charles Dickens had to start somewhere!"

Yes, Friends, don't despair if you've just received, like, your billionth publisher rejection slip for your latest masterpiece!!!

Look how even award-winning author Charles Dickens struggled in his early efforts, as this article in today's Onion News makes painfully clear, let's say !!!!

Poor Dickens!!! But, as we know now, he eventually "came good" and became a world-beater, and you can do it too!!!!!

The story, however, brings something of a "Dickensian" grin [no pun intended!!!] to the faces of me and my wife Lois here in rural, semi-mechanised Liphook, Hampshire this morning, as we tramp our way over local beauty spot Old Man Lowsley's Farm, to put it mildly!!!

(left) us this morning, chuckling over that Onion story against a stark backdrop of

winter landscape, and (right) Lois showcasing signs of spring emerging

in one of Lowsley's prize exhibits of 'naked pussywillow', which is nice!

"But why such wide grins today, Colin?", I hear you cry!

Well, you can't tell it from our faces (see photo above!), but when my phone-camera catches us unawares on our daily walk around noon this morning, we've just emerged, together with a bunch of other "old codgers", from one of the worst lectures on Dickens that we've ever attended, and we've attended quite a few, as you know!

us this morning, in company of a bunch of other "old codgers", attending

an "extremely poor" lecture about local writer-made-good Charles Dickens, no less!

Why was the lecture so poor? Well, it wasn't because our lecturer this morning, Dickensian-bearded Tim, knew too little about award-winning local author Charles Dickens, it was just he knew too much, which was a pity!!!

Although booked for a one-hour "slot" at Liphook's iconic Millennium Centre, our lecturer, poor Tim, spent 50 minutes of his allotted hour telling us about the houses where Portsmouth-born Dickens' parents, lived, mostly before little Charles was even born.

What madness!!!

slide: one of the many streets in Portsmouth where Dickens' father John,

a Royal Navy pay clerk, lived with wife Elizabeth before their son Charles was born

Finally, at around 11:20am, after being warned by the chairman, "Beaming Barry", head of the U3A's "Intermediate Local History for Old Codgers" group, that he only had 10 minutes left to 'wind up' his lecture, poor Tim did do his best to "gallop through" some early Dickens classics, getting as far as his third novel, Nicholas Nickleby, but by then it was too late, to be brutally honest!!!

All in all, a missed opportunity, no doubt about that!!!!

And Tim's last 10 minutes were all uncomfortably reminiscent of Monty Python favourite Eric Idle's short-lived TV game show series, where contestants had to summarise Proust's epic 4000-page French novel "In Search of Lost Time", in just 15 seconds. Remember that?

a typical episode of Eric Idle's short-lived TV game show series "Summarize Proust",

with (left) Eric introducing the show, and (right) hapless contestant Harry Bagot from Leicester

(left) the show's gong marks the end of Bagot's gallant, but ultimately unsuccessful

summarising attempt (right) - pictures from the award-winning Czech version of the show

Poor Bagot !!!!!!

In the last analysis, both (1) the hour-long Dickens lecture that Lois and I attended this morning and (2) Bagot's classic attempt to summarise a 4000-page classic French novel in 15 seconds, suffered from the same fatal error...

....inadequate planning, and "in spades", to put it mildly!

20:00 "Inadequate planning" is not, however, an accusation you can level at Lois and me, that's for sure!

Each evening, we take our copy of the Radio Times and ring, in advance, all the programmes we want to see, whether tonight or on "catch-up", carefully avoiding Channel 4's latest current winter Olympics "sportsfest madness", needless to say !!!!!! [You don't say! - Ed]

me, showcasing our this week's copy of Radio Times,

with the best programmes carefully "ringed", to

to maximise our viewing pleasure tonight (!)

Our star programme tonight is a wonderfully nostalgic re-run of historian Simon Schama's 26-year-old but beautifully-summarised, epic "gallop" through 5000 years of British history. And tonight's episode, deals with "that ducal Norman", William the Conqueror's mould-breaking conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066, which is nice!

Lois and I didn't know that William the Conqueror found the south of England very much ready to just "swallow its pride" after defeat at Hastings in 1066, and just "get on with the job" of getting used to the country's new Norman rulers. They had gone through the same process a few decades earlier, in 1016 with Danish king, Canute. In Canute's case, however, he had taken the throne but then left the English to pretty much get on with their lives in the way they had always done.#

William was different, however.

Unlike the south, however, the north of England apparently wasn't ready to break its former close ties with Scandinavia and the Vikings, just like that, to put it mildly! They even invited the Danish king, Sweyn, to come to England to be their new liberator from the Norman yoke.

Yikes - what madness!!!!!

Yes, William certainly wanted to show us English who was the boss now, who was our new "CEO" (!). And the same went for his Norman underlings, to whom he assigned the various English towns and cities.

Again, Lois and I didn't realise that the Anglo-Saxons didn't use fixed and permanent, formal family names, or surnames, as such. This was another Norman innovation, and, because their family names were based heavily on the names of the English towns that they've been made the new rulers of, the practice served very much to emphasise that they were the country's new bosses, to put it mildly!

So the local lord would be a Beaumont, and if children later moved away the would still be Beaumonts, including the daughters till they got married.

The Normans also standardised, for the first time in England, how property was handed down from generation to generation, all done according to the new Norman law of "primogeniture".