Making things up since 1837. Contact me at gordonwrotesomething [at] gordondarroch.com
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
As perverse as it sounds, Vladimir Putin gave a pretty good speech on Friday in proclaiming the illegal seizure of four provinces of Ukraine where his military campaign is falling apart faster than a rusty Kalashnikov. I don’t mean it was good in the sense of being eloquent, morally uplifting or intellectually stimulating. It was … Continue reading ‘Make Russia great again’: Why Putin’s annexation speech hit its mark
What use is this barrel? It’s broken; the wood is cracked and rotting, the frame is speckled with rust. The bloated planks have lost their symmetry: they're weathered and weary. Why would you keep it? A decade is a long time by any reckoning. A month can go by, a year, without much changing, but … Continue reading Over a barrel
Theatre Europe (screenshot from C64 Wiki) When I was growing up there was a computer game called Theatre Europe. It allowed you to play out, from the comfort of your Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum, a 30-day campaign between Nato and the Warsaw Pact countries, and it had three possible outcomes: either one of the … Continue reading Vladimir Putin and the fiction of war