Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Joynes, Andrew

Joynes, Andrew

Andrew Joynes worked as a BBC producer and is now a writer and historian. He is the author of Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels and Prodigies and Tracking the Major: Sketches from the Powell-Cotton Museum.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [56] 86; [66] 40; [71] 7; [78] 36; [81] 57; [85] 69

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20260302132355 Andrew-Joynes-on-Bruce-Chatwin-On-the -Black-Hill

The Watershed

Andrew Joynes on Bruce Chatwin On the Black Hill

Sometimes, on the borders of sleep, I remember the walk down from Hay Bluff to the Vale of Ewyas. Along the Brecon escarpments. Across the watershed into Nant Bwch, a ravine with a stream far below. Past a group of buildings where, in Victorian times, there was a monastic retreat, and where in the 1920s an artistic commune flourished for a time. If I have not drifted off, I pause at the church at Capel-y-Ffin, with its stumpy chimney like the tail of a perching wren; and before turning down the valley towards the ruins of Llanthony Priory I lift my drowsy mind’s eye to the ‘Vision’ farm, high on the fern-covered flank of a hill in the heart of the Black Mountains. In my mind’s ear there is the rushing sound of the River Honddu, the voice of the Vale of Ewyas.
20240301093048 Andrew-Joynes-on-Derek-Walcott,-Slightly-Foxed-81

Voyage to the Blessed Isles

Andrew Joynes pm Derek Walcott, 'The Schooner Flight

I first came across Derek Walcott’s narrative poem ‘The Schooner Flight ’ in the mid-1980s, when I was travelling on a Commonwealth bursary through the Caribbean. I was away from England for two months, on an island-stepping journey whose final destination was St Lucia in the Windward Islands – where I once worked at a radio station, and where my wife and I spent the first two years of our marriage. I must have regarded my return to St Lucia after a decade and a half as a kind of culmination – Ithaca at the end of an odyssey – and I was nervous as I walked across the tarmac at Castries airport.
20210901101025 Andrew Joynes on William Golding, The Spire, SF 71

Jocelin’s Folly

Andrew Joynes on William Golding, The Spire

Across the east end of the nave of Canterbury Cathedral, where I was a volunteer guide for over a decade, there is a stone strainer arch erected by Prior Thomas Goldstone 500 years ago. It is a kind of tiebar, one of six which bind together the columns that support Bell Harry Tower, the cathedral’s dominant feature. The arch is essential to the integrity of the building’s central structure and is decorated with flowered designs and an inscription. On either side of the Prior’s initials and his rebus – three golden pebbles, a visual pun on his surname – there is the first verse of the psalm that begins Non nobis Domine (‘Not unto us, O Lord, but unto thy name give glory . . .’).
20200601130046 Martin Yeoman illustration | Andrew Joynes, T. H. White, Slightly Foxed 66

On the Shoulders of Giants

Andrew Joynes on T. H. White, England Have My Bones

We would race past a Saxon church, its western hindquarters sunk into the hillside, a kindly beast emerging from its lair. We would teeter in slow motion beside the dark timbers of a medieval bridge. And by the time we dismounted to wheel our bicycles across the main road beneath the glass escarpment of a public school’s immense chapel, we would be looking seawards to the windsock of the airfield and skywards for the light aircraft – Tiger Moths, Chipmunks, Dragon Rapides – which were the objects of our plane-spotting pilgrimage. I am reminded of those sunlit days, and of the ‘whooshpering’ sound of the canvas wings as the aircraft swept in above us, whenever I take down my copy of T. H. White’s England Have My Bones (1936). It is a book for browsing, for it takes the form of a journal which White kept through four seasons in 1934–5, the year he took flying lessons at a small airfield in the middle of England.
20250301100027 Andrew Joynes on James Thurber, SF Issue 85

His Fate Was Sealed

Andrew Joynes on James Thurber, The Years with Ross

I was Jack the Lad in 1962. I had just left school with a scholarship that would take me to university in the autumn, but I spent the summer months in Ottawa with my father and his second wife. I smoked a pipe, an expensive Dunhill with an ivory dot on the stem. And I was working as an intern for the Canadian government’s Department of Northern Affairs. Every evening I would return from town on the commuter bus in time for an air-conditioned cocktail hour. At the age of 19 I was an avid imbiber of Manhattans, Daiquiris and Whisky Sours. I wore button-down collars and loafers, and like all the young in North America at the time I basked in the glow of the Kennedy presidency.
20171201130504 Anna Trench illustration - Andrew Joynes on Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous

Harvey Learns the Ropes

Andrew Joynes on Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous

When he gave Captains Courageous to me, my father described the opening episode of the book: a teenage boy falls overboard from a transatlantic liner at night and is hauled into a dory by a deckhand from a Grand Banks fishing schooner. Unsurprisingly, the story resonated with me immediately, for to the child’s mind the story of Captains Courageous is one of rescue. A boy falls into the sea, has adventures and forms friendships, and in due course is returned to his grieving parents.

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