If last year was lively on Eponymous (aka timdracup.com), 2025 has been positively manic. In 2024, I published 26 posts and thought that was good going. But this is my 41st post of 2025. That inclu…

Paul Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was born in Lübeck, Germany. His father was a wealthy Lutheran grain merchant; his mother, a Brazilian-born Roman Catholic with German and Portuguese ancestry. When his father died in 1891, the family moved to Munich, where Mann lived until 1933. In 1905 he married Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a Jewish mathematician and from an even wealthier family than his own.

We come full circle with this 12th and final post in my Ouroboros series, each exploring a piece of music that is personally important to me. Last time round I gave the game away, explaining that I’d been unable to choose a single composition by Franco et le TPOK Jazz. There had to be at least two. For Ouroboros 11 I chose ‘Tres Impoli’, originally from the album of the same name, released in 1984.

This is the second instalment of a two-part study examining the family history of four Dracup siblings who emigrated to the United States. It complements a parallel study exploring the family history of four more siblings who chose to stay in England. All eight were the children of George Dracup (1824-96) and his wife Jane, nee Bullock (1824-1886). The first part of this post…

This extended family history post is a companion piece to George Dracup (1824-1896) and his English descendants (September 2024). The George Dracup in question and his wife, Jane, nee Bullock (1824-1886) may have had up to twelve children, but only eight definitely reached adulthood. Of those, four sons opted to remain in England, while four further children – two sons and two daughters – migrated to the United States.

It’s high time for the tenth study in my Ouroboros cycle. This series will ultimately explore twelve pieces of music that are important to me, the twelfth and final choice linking back to the first. Indeed, each piece of music must link in some way with its immediate predecessor, but I haven’t planned the cycle in advance, so decisions are taken ‘on the hoof’, reflecting my predilections at that particular point.

John Maxwell Coetzee was born in 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa. He attended a Catholic school and then the University of Cape Town. After three years working as a computer programmer in England, he completed a PhD on Samuel Beckett at the University of Texas, Austin, then spent a further three years teaching English Literature at the State University of New York, in Buffalo.

Our choice of holiday in Autumn 2025 fell to me. I was seeking a happy medium, roughly midway between our full-on, energy-sapping experience in the Swiss Alps and last year’s ‘rest and relaxation’ experiment in Cefalu, Sicily. Eventually I decided on a Saga holiday, Walking in Gran Canaria, a week long, departing in early October. It offered five walks, all between 5m and 14km long.

William Trevor Cox (1928-2016) disposed of his surname for writing purposes. He was born in County Cork, Ireland, to James Cox, a bank manager, and Gertrude, nee Davison, originally from Ulster. They were a Protestant family. It was not a particularly happy childhood and, owing to his father's postings, Trevor spent it in several different southern Irish outposts before reading history at Trinity College, Dublin (having begun in the Medical School).

Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) was born in rural Minnesota, the youngest child of a doctor. When he was six, his mother died and his father remarried. Lewis attended Yale, graduating in 1908, after which he worked as editor for a variety of newspapers and publishers. His first serious novel appeared in 1914 but success eluded him until 'Main Street', published in 1920, made him a fortune.

Ninth in my ‘not-planned-in-advance’ cycle, codenamed Ouroboros, in which I’m exploring twelve pieces of music that hold personal significance. This one is really a dark horse (no pun intended). It has never featured at the top of my playlists of personal favourites, and it has little in common with other selections in this sequence. Though, when I come to consider why I’m writing about it, I realise that it has long been lurking somewhere in the background, exerting a surreptitious influence.

We returned to complete the Coast Path in September 2025, basing ourselves in Swanage. This nineteenth and final visit marked the end of a project begun in Minehead in October 2017, almost eight years earlier. Pre-Covid, we would travel down for up to five days at a time but, since our ninth visit (Port Isaac to Holywell Bay), we have devoted a full week to each section.

Eighth in my Ouroboros series, about pieces of music I particularly value. This time round it's 'Black Diamond Bay', from Bob Dylan's 1975 album 'Desire'.

Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010) was born into a privileged family of businessmen, lawyers and stockbrokers. Though, according to him, the Auchincloss menfolk owed their wealth, not to inheritance, but to advantageous marriages and their personal acumen. He studied at Yale but, midway through his degree, transferred to read law at the University of Virginia, eventually graduating in 1941. Aside from wartime service in naval intelligence and three years as a full-time writer, he pursued a legal career until retirement.

We’ve reached the seventh in this sequence of twelve posts, each exploring a musical composition with particular personal significance. Each musical choice is linked in some fashion with its immediate predecessor. I hope to end in December (or thereabouts) with a piece of music that has some sort of connection with my first selection, back in January. This has been the sequence to date:

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) was born Penelope Knox, her parents being Edward Knox, a poet and later Editor of 'Punch' and Christina, nee Hicks, daughter of the Bishop of Lincoln. She graduated from Somerville College, Oxford in 1938, and in 1942 married Desmond Fitzgerald, a barrister. Ten years later he was caught forging signatures on cheques to fund his alcoholism and, as a consequence, was disbarred.

Tracy chose this seven-night guided walking holiday with HF Holidays, a company we have used often. The holiday runs several times across the summer season. We had booked on to the first iteration of 2025, hoping to catch Alpine spring flowers in their prime. Arrival We woke at 05:00. Our taxi arrived promptly and, half an hour later, deposited us at Heathrow Terminal 2.

Dame Penelope Lively was born Penelope Margaret Low in Cairo, Egypt, in 1933, to Roger Low, a bank manager, and Vera, nee Greer. When her parents divorced in 1945, her father sent her to an English boarding school, from which she proceeded to St Anne's College, Oxford, where she read modern history. Shortly after graduating she married Jack Lively (1930-1998), later Professor of Politics at Warwick University.

We returned to the South Downs Way in June 2025, having completed Cocking to Washington at the end of January. Once again we were anxiously monitoring weather forecasts, though this time we were ke…

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, at the south-eastern extremity of the Mississippi Delta. The Delta is an alluvial floodplain of some 7,000 square miles, spreading across …

We returned to the South Downs Way in June 2025, having completed Cocking to Washington at the end of January. Once again we were anxiously monitoring weather forecasts, though this time we were keen to avoid heatwave conditions rather than persistent wind and rain. As it turned out, conditions on our first day were warm but not oppressively so. On the second, we made sure to finish before temperatures began nudging into the 80s.

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, at the south-eastern extremity of the Mississippi Delta. The Delta is an alluvial floodplain of some 7,000 square miles, spreading across north-west Mississippi, between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. Welty studied at the Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University before returning to Jackson in 1931. It remained her home for the rest of her long life.

It would have been Kate’s 64th birthday on 4 July 2025, had her life not ended in the Princess Alice Hospice on 13 July 2017, shortly after her 56th and final birthday. Every year we make two memorial pilgrimages to the place where we scattered her ashes, on her birthday and on Boxing Day. And I write an annual bereavement-related post to mark her birthday, each post marked with the hashtag #Kateday plus the year it was written.