by Nigel Scotchmer | Mar 3, 2026 | Ramblings
“The line separating good and evil passes through every human heart.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago I was in Budapest when I heard about the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. One of the worst things about this horror is how quickly it...
by Nigel Scotchmer | Jan 13, 2026 | Essays
Can’t get enough of irony, can we? So, we created a club. Welcome one and all! We would like to thank you for subscribing to The Ironist and for your kind encouragement over the past two years. It has meant more to us than we can easily say. As a result, we have...
by Nigel Scotchmer | Dec 30, 2025 | Essays
The new year is here… As the year turns, I find myself thinking about what we carry forward and what truly matters. The grand sweep of The Lord of the Rings enthralled me in high school. I had read it two or three times by the time I reached university. It was...
by Nigel Scotchmer | Dec 16, 2025 | Essays
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness – Wordsworth, Independence and Resolution, Stanza VII Children prove we all seek a better life. They quickly learn that walking helps them . They learn that talking gets...
by Nigel Scotchmer | Oct 14, 2025 | Recipes
Nigel explains how the Roman precursor to our modern toilet brush, the xylospongium, gave us our grilled meat on a stick, our modern kebabs…and then he concludes with an original Parthian recipe. The other day, while fulminating on the algorithmic vacuity of Facebook,...