Making things up since 1837. Contact me at gordonwrotesomething [at] gordondarroch.com
Monday, July 13 Getting there … in Aalborg Travel time: 8 hours, 18 minutes Distance covered: 758km We set out for the German border at 8.15am, only 15 minutes behind schedule, though it stretches to 25 minutes when I have to go back for my glasses and my eldest son forgets his raincoat. The last … Continue reading Dad’s gone to Iceland: Day 3
Sunday, July 12 We're not flying: we're sailing with style. Travel time: 20 minutes Distance covered: 20km I had a private cinema screening today. That’s not how it was planned: one of my sons wanted to watch Toy Story 5 and the film was showing at 11am on Sunday. The cinema in Emmen offered a … Continue reading Dad’s gone to Iceland: Day 2
This is a travel blog of my 16-day round trip by land and sea with my sons from The Hague to Iceland in July 2026 Saturday, July 11 We are not in Iceland yet! Travel time: 2hrs 33 minutes Distance covered: 228km Location: Emmen (NL) In these days of cheap flights, few destinations can still … Continue reading Dad’s gone to Iceland: Day 1
Garrincha tormented England in the 1962 quarter-final. Photo: Brazilian national archive English football fans tend to assume that the 1966 World Cup win was a confirmation of the natural order. The country that gave football to the world had given Johnny Foreigner a masterclass at the sport’s hallowed cathedral, Wembley Stadium. Football had come home. … Continue reading A brief history of English footballing failures (part 1)
Magteld in 2008, aged 32 Why do we say of people who have died that they are no longer with us? Magteld ceased to exist physically 12 years ago today, but she is still intensely with us – not just in our thoughts, but in the photographs hanging in the house that she chose for … Continue reading With us
The national Covid memorial wall in London on its first anniversary in The outbreak of hantavirus on a Dutch cruise ship in the South Atlantic has stirred up painful suppressed memories of the Covid-19 pandemic. The dominant response on social media has been “oh no, not again” or “I’m not joining in this time”, along … Continue reading A week of remembering and forgetting
Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Gothic Arch, from Le Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), First Edition (1750) In José Luis Borges’ The Immortal, the opening story of The Aleph, the narrator, a Roman soldier, sets out to find the City of Immortals, an abandoned metropolis located across a desert – intrigued by the question: if its residents … Continue reading Borges’ buildings and the prison of the imagination
Photo by Lorenzo Castellino The success of The Salt Path, Raynor Winn’s memoir of her and her husband’s desperate, inspirational trek round the coast of Cornwall, shows how hungry we humans are for a feel-good story. An investigation by The Observer has revealed that parts of Winn’s story were embellished, distorted and possibly completely made … Continue reading Moths to a flame
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nat507/34808202882 I watched a man have an expensive hat put on his head today. I’m not sure why. I mean, I know why the man put the hat on: he needed to assert his supremacy over his subjects, and donning an extravagant item of headgear on television is the established way of doing it. I … Continue reading The heavy head of state
Roald Dahl signing books for pre-woke era children in Amsterdam in 1988. Photo: Rob Bogaerts / Anefo/ Nationaal Archief The anti-woke brigade gained a new hero this week: the much loved and still widely read late children’s author, Roald Dahl. Triggered by a modest footnote in one of Puffin’s latest editions, the Daily Telegraph carried … Continue reading Charlie and the Great Straw-Person Parade