The most exciting projects finding new uses for factories, mills and silos

Slip on your sheepskin coat, grab your team sheet and step up to the mic - it’s time for another Guide To! 

Marcus, Luke and Pete are here to sort the magicians from the McManamans, as we break down the traits behind the best commentators around. We also hear some of the all-time classics, including a rendition of Gol de Kevin Phillips and an Andy Gray masterclass. Whatever happened to him?

What do you want us to talk about next? Find us @FootballRamble or email us This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up for our Patreon before the end of August and get 15% off an annual membership! Plus exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

In French the word merle means blackbird, a dark bird of the thrush family. A blackbird’s song marks its territory. The male has black feathers and a yellow beak. It is in the same genus as the meadowlark. Forty years after first meeting James Merrill at my teacher David Kalstone’s Chelsea apartment, I am sitting at his desk in Stonington, Connecticut, with his large Petit Larousse open before me. Searching for the meanings of our names in French, I am distracted by a blackbird perched on the windowsill, drinking a little dew and then swaying on a nearby branch. It speaks in polished, rudimentary tones with a slow tempo.

Merrill’s big desk is in a small room—in an apartment of small rooms—behind a hinged bookcase that creates a very private space. Still, I can hear a train whistle, a foghorn, halyard lines clinking against the masts of sloops anchored in the harbor, church chimes, and bits of conversation from villagers below on Water Street. These must be the sounds Merrill heard, too, while working. He was an early riser and liked to give the first hours of the day to his poems, which reflect, mirrorlike, so many of my own feelings. Mirrors are also a motif in his poems—mirrors that remember us across the years, reflecting our beauty and dissolution alike. It has taken me some days to sit at his desk.

In French, my name means collar, and I think immediately of the metaphysical poet George Herbert’s poem “The Collar,” published in 1633, a poem in which the fervid speaker seeks more freedom in his life. It is a poem of strong feeling, almost like a rant. Like his friend Elizabeth Bishop, Merrill loved Herbert’s poems and could quote them by heart. During my twenties and thirties, perhaps there was no living poet I admired more than Merrill, and I am drawn still to this American poet, who was said to be writing even while needing oxygen on the night before his death more than twenty-five years ago.

I met the novelist Anuradha Roy in Delhi in the mid-nineties, when she was an editor at Oxford University Press and I had just published my first book. Not long after that, she moved to a Himalayan town to set up Permanent Black, now India’s premier intellectual publisher, with her husband, Rukun Advani. She also began to write fiction. Her fifth novel, The Earthspinner, which was released in the United States this summer, is about the war on reason and on imagination in a world consumed by political fanaticism.

Though I don’t remember what was said in our first meeting, I can recall a certain hopefulness in the air—there was a lot of that about, among publishers and writers, in India in the nineties. Writing in English was ceasing to be the furtive and poorly paid endeavor it long had been. There were greater opportunities to publish; new literary periodicals and networks of promotion seemed to be creating the infrastructure for more vigorous intellectual and artistic life. Indeed, the conventional wisdom of that decade, helped by the prominence of Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Arundhati Roy abroad, was that Indian writing in English was “arriving,” no less resoundingly than was India’s embrace of consumer capitalism at the end of history. One measure of this apparent progress was the respectful international attention such work elicited. Granta and The New Yorker devoted issues to Indian writing in 1997, the fiftieth year of India’s independence from British colonialism.

In 2022, there is something very forlorn about the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s independence. Murderous Hindu supremacists rule the country, and lynch mobs—physical and digital—police its cultural and intellectual life. Educated Indians spend much of their time and energy trying to emigrate. Literature remains, for a tiny minority, the means to cognition in the darkness, and literary festivals project, briefly, the illusion of a community. But every writer seems terribly alone with herself. The sense of a meaningful shared space and a common language, the possibility of a broad literary flourishing—many of those fragile shoots of the nineties have been trampled into the ground by the ferocious invaders of private as well as public spheres.

Over twenty-five years of radical transformations, Anuradha and I have kept intermittently in touch. While emailing in recent months, I began to wonder if other readers should be invited to reflect on the fate of writers in India today. What follows is a conversation that explores some of the historical uniqueness of this fate.

Why we have a bias against colour

The yellow No. 2 Pencil remains as reliable for schoolwork as ever, but a mechanical pencil lets students write for hours without interruption, no matter if they tend to press down hard on the page. Never requiring sharpening, mechanical pencils also come in different designs to suit one’s personality. You can even load them with colorful leads to brighten up the page and make homework slightly more appealing (if circumstances allow). The ones we’ve chosen here all hold 0.7mm leads, a useful lead size that’s ideal for day-to-day writing and sketching, as well as less detailed technical drawing. And since 0.7mm leads are popular, refills are available in a wide range of grades, from soft to hard. With their durable construction and ergonomically designed grips, these pencils should last through many school years.

How we pick each product:

Our mission is to recommend the most appropriate artists’ tool or supply for your needs. Whether you are looking for top-of-the line equipment or beginners’ basics, we’ll make sure that you get good value for your money by doing the research for you. We scour the Internet for information on how art supplies are used and read customer reviews by real users; we ask experts for their advice; and of course, we rely on our own accumulated expertise as artists, teachers, and craftspeople.

Today’s Featured Deals

In Case You Missed Yesterday’s Most Popular Deals

Previous Daily Deals

A high-quality sketch pad is a must-have for students, whether for experiments with new techniques or materials, quick studies, or freewheeling ideas. Compared to drawing pads, which are meant for final works of art, sketch pads are designed with practice works in mind. This means the paper tends to be thinner and won’t be archival—but the products are also more budget-friendly. Still, sketch pads feature paper in a variety of weights and surface textures to satisfy different needs. If you anticipate needing, or your child needing, to work in dry media such as pencil or pastel, lighter weights will be suitable, and you’ll find that you have more paper options; for work in pen, marker, or watercolor, a pad made specifically for multimedia use may be best. Sketchbooks also come in many sizes, but all of our picks below measure around a handy 9 by 12 inches—large enough to accommodate many ideas, but small enough to slip into a backpack.

How we pick each product:

Our mission is to recommend the most appropriate artists’ tool or supply for your needs. Whether you are looking for top-of-the line equipment or beginners’ basics, we’ll make sure that you get good value for your money by doing the research for you. We scour the Internet for information on how art supplies are used and read customer reviews by real users; we ask experts for their advice; and of course, we rely on our own accumulated expertise as artists, teachers, and craftspeople.

June 30 – August 6, 2022