Latest news with #Dickensian
USA Today
6 days ago
- Sport
- USA Today
Arizona Cardinals DL Darius Robinson learned from a difficult 2024 season
Arizona Cardinals DL Darius Robinson learned from a difficult 2024 season Darius Robinson speaks after his tough rookie year about going in to his second NFL season "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." -Charles Dickens from A Tale of Two Cities Arizona Cardinals second-year defensive lineman Darius Robinson was almost Dickensian Wednesday when putting into words what his first season in the NFL was like. He said simply, 'Last year was like the hardest year of my life, but then it was the best year of my life in the same year. So I definitely felt the lowest, but I also felt the highest and I'm ready to get back to the highest point. And I know that it takes a lot of hard work. So I'm just super excited for this year.' The highs, of course, began in April when the Cardinals selected him in the first round of the draft with the 27th overall pick. It continued during offseason work and training camp, a time he described as 'hot.' However, it all came crashing down when he suffered a calf injury on Aug. 22 and continued through a difficult rehab process that included the death of his mom Valori in October. When he finally got on the field for the final six games of the season, that 'hot' feeling in camp was now 'just cool.' But he learned from it. 'At my lowest, I kept showing up each day, I kept fighting in the pursuit of my dreams,' Robinson said. 'And I realize, it can't get worse than that. So honestly, just keep putting one foot in front of another and just go. Just really enjoy this. It's a blessing being here.' Being here was preceded by some time in Michigan where he was able to reflect on the previous nine months. Asked about an offseason reset after what he went through last season, Robinson said, 'Yeah, it was a lot. Going back to Michigan, taking care of some family stuff, trying to get closure with everything with my mom. But also thinking about this season and just replaying; I only played six games but just constantly rethinking about those six games and thinking about what I need to do to make that next jump in my game. 'I feel like in training camp, it was hot. The table was hot, everybody, it was hot. And coming back, it was just cool. So I gotta find a way to; we're in Phoenix, I gotta get it hot again.' Head coach Jonathan Gannon was asked before the first OTA practice Wednesday what he expects from Robinson. 'I think all our guys, it's, let's see where they can go,' Gannon said. 'And him being one of them. He's worked extremely hard this offseason. He looks good. He's ready to go. He wants to get on the grass and play football. So I think that's all of our guys and you're never a finished product. You're either getting better, or you're getting worse, whatever that means. It's kind of cliche, but it's probably true. 'So our guys are just looking to maximize themselves and get better as football players.' As for Robinson making the oft-discussed jump from Year 1 to Year 2, Gannon emphatically said, 'He'll make that jump.' Robinson was just as emphatic in agreement, saying, 'I think this jump from Year 1 to Year 2 is gonna be huge. So I'm just excited to compete and just put it on tape.' A big man already, Robinson is noticeably stronger in the upper body just as second-year receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. is. Asked about the offseason work he put in, Robinson said, 'Just buying into it, realizing like every day I got 24 hours and what am I gonna do to make the most out of it? I feel like I got a lot to prove this year. So we just come in like seven or eight (in the morning) and leave at like 12 or 1. 'Me, Marvin, a bunch of the rookies, a bunch of guys in the building. So it's just grinding into it. And that's been fun all offseason, but we gotta keep going and just keep building our bodies, get strong, get fast, and get better. So I'm super excited.' Get more Cardinals and NFL coverage from Cards Wire's Jess Root and others by listening to the latest on the Rise Up, See Red podcast. Subscribe on Spotify, YouTube or Apple podcasts.
Irish Daily Mirror
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Daily Mirror
'We haven't come so far as a country, Joe. In fact we've gone backwards'
I was surprised to hear Joe Duffy cheer Ireland's social progress on the Late Late Show, saying: 'We've come so far as a country.' The legendary broadcaster was chatting last week to Patrick Kielty to mark his retirement after 27 years of listening to the nation on Liveline. The Ballyfermot man is one of our most down-to-earth public figures, and I'm a big fan. But I'd have thought he'd be highly aware of the realities of life in Ireland today, specifically the social ill of housing that's destroying families. Instead, Duffy's takeaway was how - less than a century ago - we were yet to abolish the workhouse, and therefore we'd advanced as a species. 'We have come so far and I think that's absolutely brilliant,' he said. 'We should acknowledge it without losing the context of the housing crisis and all that carry on.' It's a pretty low bar if you're using Dickensian workhouses as a starting point. The only way is up, from there. But I don't think by any standard we can look around at how ordinary, hard-working people can't afford to rent or buy; or witness kids queueing up at soup kitchens; or know families are living in one room, and pat ourselves on the back. We can't take record homeless figures of 15,000, including nearly 5,000 children, and conclude we've done a good job. In fact, about 100 years ago, a golden age of housing was about to start. Ireland moved from the 1920s of cramped tenements, collapsing houses and the worst slums outside of Calcutta, to large scale construction of social housing. Most of the houses built from the 1930s up to the 1970s were council houses. At one stage, it was as high a 55% of all housing output. To put that in perspective, that figure is 5.5% this past decade. As many as one-fifth of people were accommodated in social housing during that time. I was one of them. I grew up in a council house built in the 1970s. Shamefully, I used to be slightly self-conscious about this. Now I think I was lucky to grow up in a time and place where people could raise families, without need for two incomes, in a decent home. Wealthier friends of mine lived in big detached houses and that suited them. But we were just as happy in our Rockypool estate. Then, over time, there was a deliberate shift away from social housing, with it effectively ceasing after the economic crash. The Government outsourced it into the private market, killing two birds with one stone, so they thought. Landlords were happy, state was happy - with the landlords paying nearly half the rent income back to the taxman, it benefitted both to let rents get higher. But it predictably backfired. Ultimately, it's this flip from social housing as state investment to social housing as private profit that created a housing crisis that's been going on for 11 years. There's this received narrative that housing problems are a constant, that this is just the latest phase of an ongoing issue. They're not: they were caused by government policy that could not have been more guaranteed to cause a crisis if someone sat down and designed them specifically for that purpose. Just one example of this is how our leaders let rents go as high as they could go before bringing in basic rights for tenants in a crisis, such as rent caps and protection from being turfed out your own home in a matter of weeks. Finance Minister Michael Noonan said it in the Dail in 2014: "We need rents to go a little bit higher." Another is how they responded to spiralling rents by boosting the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP), paying more money into landlords' pockets, instead of limiting what they could squeeze out of renters. They refused for years to bring in a rent cap. Then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar confirmed in 2021 it was a profit-driven business, saying: "One person's rent is another person's income." So don't buy into the political handwringing about it, and the headlines about state 'solutions' to a crisis it has engineered and maintained. The housing crisis is now an established housing system, and the reason it hasn't been 'solved' is because it suits too many people. In my view, it's comparable to why America does not have a functioning healthcare system and instead lets the citizen shoulder the financial burden. I don't believe we've come so far as a country. Instead, we've gone backwards.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Yahoo
Popular summer cruises return to Southend Pier with new trip to historic town
MORE sightseeing cruises are coming to Southend Pier as a river tour operator has added new summer dates to its calendar. Jetstream Tours, which offers river cruises from the landmark pleasure pier, has announced new dates for its exciting sightseeing adventures. This includes trips to the historic Redsand army forts in the estuary, and quaint fishing village Queenborough. Also new for 2025 is a Rochester day-trip, where visitors can enjoy the town's Dickensian high streets, have a spot of lunch and have a browse in the shops. This day out also allows daytrippers to discover the historic relevance of the River Medway, sailing past Chatham Dockyard and Upnor Castle. Commentary along the way will point out more than just what you can see but allow you uncover relics of the deep, stories of battles and rebuilding. A Jetstream Tours spokesman said: "New dates have now been added to our website for July and August. Limited September also available. "Please check out our website for the dates of your favourite tour." Visit for more dates. Tickets range from £25 to £40 for adults, depending on the chosen trip, and infants go free. There are also OAP and family tickets to take advantage of.
New Statesman
21-05-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Dickens's Britain is still with us
Photo by Chronicle / Alamy The New Statesman staff are sometimes drawn to the windows of our first-floor office in Hatton Garden by events unfolding outside: a purple Lamborghini pulling up to the jeweller's next door, a music video being filmed on phones in the middle of the road, groups of men striking deals or squaring up to each other while security guards coolly observe. I'm always aware, though, that what we're looking at are Dickens's streets. Here are the ghosts of Victorian inequality: slumlands full of crime and punishment. A few doors down is the magistrates' court where Oliver Twist is brought and accused of picking pockets; a couple of streets east is the 'wretched place' where Fagin has his den, and the 'low public-house, in the filthiest part of Little Saffron Hill' frequented by Bill Sikes. Poverty in Britain is regularly described as Victorian or Dickensian – it has become unthinking shorthand, in the way state bureaucracy is reliably Kafkaesque and tech innovations are Orwellian. And yet, the comparison feels increasingly less hyperbolic. Revisiting A Christmas Carol last December – yes, all right, the Muppets version, but it's a family tradition, and besides the screenplay is remarkably faithful – it seemed to me that Dickens's world and our own seem to be drawing closer. The financial precariousness of the Cratchits could be described as 'in-work poverty': Bob's wages as Ebenezer Scrooge's clerk are barely sufficient to keep his family afloat. Today 72 per cent of children in poverty live in a household where someone is in work. The benefits-slashing New Poor Law of 1834 – detested by Dickens – was informed by a Malthusian approach to what Scrooge calls the 'surplus population': generous hand-outs, it was felt, would only encourage working-class families to have more children. It's hard not to hear an echo of such thinking in the Conservatives' two-child benefit cap, so far upheld by Labour: an immoral policy that punishes children from birth. And yes, that would include Tiny Tim. Three in ten children in the UK today are living below the poverty line, an appalling statistic that is at the heart of this special issue of the New Statesman guest edited by Gordon Brown. Dickens's work still speaks to us because of his genius, but his Britain should feel like history. It's to our shame that it does not. Dickens is well read in today's schools: that sounds like something to celebrate, part of the legacy of Michael Gove's education reforms, which we seem to have collectively decided were a Very Good Thing. But speaking to English teachers while looking around secondary schools for my daughter, I was struck by how narrow the curriculum has become. The tables were heaving with copies of A Christmas Carol, Macbeth and An Inspector Calls but contemporary fiction was practically non-existent. When exam boards add more adventurous and modern texts, schools – without the funds to buy new books, or the time to create new teaching resources – tend to stick to what they know. Given the golden age of writing for children and young adults we have been living through in the last 30 years – from Philip Pullman to Malorie Blackman, Katherine Rundell to Alex Wheatle – this is profoundly depressing. The number of students taking English literature at university is falling rapidly, as is the proportion of school pupils who say they read for pleasure. Our system is prioritising exam proficiency and the dubious concept of 'cultural capital' above a love of reading. I would like to say that Dickens, whose concerns were contemporary and whose instincts were unfailingly popular, would not approve – but actually I expect any arrangement that kept him in the bestseller lists would have suited him fine. This is my last issue of the New Statesman before leaving for pastures new: Tom McTague, the new editor-in-chief, launches his first edition on 13 June. I have been acting editor for the past five months, but part of the team for 11 years. Throughout, I have tried to be an evangelist for the back half of the magazine: the writing on books, culture and the 'rest of life'. There is a fallacy (not helped by our education system) that the arts are 'soft'. They are, of course, nothing of the sort: even when not overtly political, art is a lens that brings the political world into focus. It also makes us better humans. The novelist Eimear McBride describes her theatre training as teaching her to employ 'a kind of radical empathy'. That is what good art can do (just ask Dickens) – and it is something our politics is in desperate need of. In my time at the NS my colleagues and I have worked with guest editors including Grayson Perry (who scrawled: 'Cars and watches: not messy like feelings!' on his men's-mag parody cover), Michael Sheen (whose Covid-era catch-up calls included revelations about Tony Blair's Union Jack boxer shorts) and Greta Thunberg (who joined our first video call while striding through Stockholm pushing a broken bike). Gordon Brown (whose moral conviction and preacher's-son past is evident in every interaction) is the only person to have guest edited twice: we collaborated on an issue in June 2016 titled 'Britain in Europe', just before Britain decided Europe was where it didn't want to be. We may have lost that argument but we must not lose this one. On child poverty the case is as clear as the stakes are high. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe [See also: The catastrophe in Gaza] Related
Scroll.in
19-05-2025
- Health
- Scroll.in
‘I am still writing for the lonely soul': At 91, Ruskin Bond looks back at his literary life
A plentitude of pickles Anglo-Indians grew up on chutneys. 'Sugar and spice and everything nice' – and it was only when I was in my teens that I discovered the pleasure of those 'pickled peppers that Peter Piper picked'! Mango pickles are probably the most popular to set the tongue on fire, closely followed by lime or lemon, sharp and sour. But I have a weakness for the Punjabi shalgam-gajar achaar (turnip-and-carrot pickle), preferably home-made. It was first introduced to me by my Punjabi landlady some seventy years ago, and I am always on the lookout for it when turnips are in season. Another home-made pickle that I enjoy is jackfruit. Jackfruit is an all-purpose vegetable that can be served up as a curry, pickle or even jam! There is an array of pickle jars on my dining table, including lotus stem, green chillies, garlic, ginger and haldi. Yes, haldi makes a great pickle. Spread a little on your breakfast toast or paratha, but don't overdo it. The other day, a doctor friend dropped in to see me, took one horrified look at my collection of pickles, and exclaimed, 'But all that salt, Mr Bond! It can't be good for your blood pressure!' 'Just a peck of pickle at breakfast,' I said. 'They say garlic is good for the blood pressure.' 'And so it is. But all that salt!' He insisted on taking my blood pressure. It was a bit on the higher side. 'More leafy vegetables,' he advised, 'And don't pickle them!' But cabbage leaves make a great pickle. They call it kimchi in Korea! Laugh and be fat! 'Laugh and be fat, sir!' This remark was attributed to Ben Jonson, the Elizabethan playwright – not to be confused with Dr Samuel Johnson, the chap who wrote the first-ever dictionary. Both were men of ample girth (we are told), but Ben was fun, and the good doctor was inclined to be grumpy. Classical literature has its quota of portly men, most of them good-natured souls who have found a place in our affections. Mr Pickwick, the Cheeryble brother (in Nicholas Nickleby), a host of Dickensian characters, comic or choleric, and, of course, Shakespeare's Falstaff, stealing the show in Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor. English literature is full of loveable buffoons, strangely absent from American literature; those early pioneers and gunslingers were usually dead before they could put on weight. The Americans did better in films. My favourite actor was Oliver Hardy (partner of Stan Laurel) who took all the hard knocks in their comedy films. And there was no finer villain than the suave Sydney Greenstreet, the fat man in Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon and other classics. The novelist Rex Stout created a detective called Nero Wolfe, who grew orchards, drank gallons of beer and never left his apartment. He had a fabulous cook. All this must have been wishful thinking on the part of Mr Stout who, in spite of his name, had a trim figure, or so we are told. Why this special interest in fat men? Well, I'm a little on the stout side myself, and while I can still climb the steps to my rooms (no easy task for anyone), I can no longer climb mountains or even the Qutub Minar. But then, I'm in my ninetieth year, and I see no point in fasting or jogging around Camel's Back Road (in Landour) in order to lose a few kilos. So, am I on the side of Ben Jonson or Dr Johnson? I have my grumpy days, but, by and large, I'm still a cheerful soul. 'Laugh and be fat, sir!' The loneliness of the writer As a writer, you tread a lonely path. There is no one to hold your hand. That pen is yours and yours alone, and only you should decide what to do with it. Basically, we write for ourselves. An author is his own best audience. After all, his little masterpiece may not find more than a handful of readers, so he must be content with the satisfaction that he derives from his creative effort. My first book of poems sold twenty copies. I gave away a few copies, hoping for some kind reader's approval. When I asked one of them if he liked the book, he said, 'Terrific! The illustrations were great!' When you set out to be a writer, you must be ready for heartbreak. There will be many disappointments. Not every editor or publisher will fall for your literary style, the appeal of your characters (if you are a fiction writer) or your great thoughts, if you aspire to be a great thinker. There are all sorts of writers. Some are thinking writers, some are instinctive writers and some are lyrical writers. They work alone, sometimes in lonely places. It's only the formula writers who are immune to the anguish of failure. These are those writers who churn out a thriller a month while also being part of the party circuit and a member of the local yacht club. But they aspire to fortune, if not fame. The great works of literature were often created in adverse circumstances: Wuthering Heights, while Emily Brontë struggled with tuberculosis; the poet John Keats, dying in his twenties from the same disease; Stevenson writing such diverse works as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Suicide Club and A Child's Garden of Verses (among others) before dying on his island in the South Seas in his forties. Great works often emerged from great suffering: Dostoevsky in prison; Victor Hugo in prison and then in exile; Jonathan Swift in the stocks; Virginia Woolf struggling with depression; Ezra Pound combating madness. But the greatest anguish, the desert of loneliness, comes to those who have achieved much and then lost it: Scott Fitzgerald's falling from favour and his descent into alcoholism. Hemingway's despair and suicide. Wilde's persecution and exile. Some writers fall from grace. Others are forgotten. Better not to be read at all than to be forgotten! The literary life can be cruel. So, we must write for ourselves, and then we won't be disappointed. Here I am, sitting at the dining table, putting down these thoughts, while several unrelated activities go on around me. They have nothing to do with what I am writing. Siddharth is shouting at Gautam. Gautam is shouting at Shrishti. Shrishti is on the phone, shouting at someone. Two little girls walk in through the open front door. It's someone's birthday, and they have brought sweets. The flow of my writing has been interrupted, so I help myself to a ladoo. This is not a lonely scene, and mine is not a lonely life. But sometimes, when evening falls, and no one is in the house, I remember times when I was alone and lonely and writing just for some other lonely soul, someone I would never see or know. And I am still writing for that lonely soul.
