When I'm old, by Izzy Ullmann

When I'm old, and not grey, nor full of sleep

I'll be dyeing my hair and watching films late at night,

And getting up mid morning, like a teenager.

I shall refuse to wear big knickers from M and S, and shudder at slip-on shoes,

And make a Yule Log instead of Christmas pudding.

I shall enjoy my bus pass, and get off at places I've never been before,

And sit alone in the pub, drinking a pint.

I'll play pianos in public train stations, with arthritic hands,

And read all of À la recherche du temps perdu.

My corpus, although ranting with pills,

Will delight in long, deep baths , if I can get in them.

I will frown at huddles of old folks

Enthusiastically expatiating about their maladies.

My dreams will be in the beech woods,

Picking mushrooms, or riding my bike,

Or walking the flint-sharp paths, listening to the blackbird's minims from Chiltern paths.

Charles Huntingdon, by Peter Shilston

 This is the foreword of my online historical novel. The complete novel can be read at pgvshil.blogspot.com

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 Charles Huntingdon was never a politician of the first rank, and even the great Sir Lewis Namier, in his famous surveys of Parliament in the 1760s, could find little to say about him. I knew scarcely more than just his name before the document I am publishing here came into my hands. 

   I was doing the rounds of the Cambridge colleges and the university library, conducting research into eighteenth century politics, when a young trainee assistant librarian, Ms. Whitmore, produced for me something she had found gathering the dust of centuries in the depths of what is euphemistically known as the “reserve collection”. It was a large wooden box, catalogued as having been deposited in 1775 by “Charles Huntingdon, M.P.”, with instructions that it should not be opened until after his death and that of his wife; but as far as Ms. Whitmore was able to ascertain, it had never in fact been opened since it came into the college’s possession. The box proved to contain the memoirs of the said Charles Huntingdon.

   Although Huntingdon was an obscure politician, he met many of the most important people of that period. He has left us descriptions of them, and he also casts a fresh light on the daily lives of the landed classes of his day. The most startling aspect of his memoirs, however, is that he reveals details of some extraordinary adventures in which he took part; and after reading these I can well understand why he did not want them to become widely known until much later.   

  It is for this reason that I am bringing his memoirs to the attention of the public for the first time. Some episodes, which appear to be unrelated to the main story, have been relegated to an appendix at the conclusion. With the aim of attracting a wider readership, I have modernised the spelling and punctuation and broken up the narrative into short chapters, for which the titles are entirely my own. The illustrations, which show various eighteenth century scenes, are also my choice.

  My thanks are due above all to Ms. Abigail Whitmore, without whose encouragement and advice my task would have been impossible. 

                                                       P.G.S.