They tell me the World of life, starting with the Achaean Period, is about four and half million years old. When I studied Ancient History which had the traditional syllabus of Greek history broadly across the fifth century BCE (496 – 404) and the Roman Period of 122 BCE to 14AD there were some thinkers,…
Month: January 2010
Music
Listening to Albinoni ,The Complete Concertos from a Phillips release in 1997. Having spent way too long listening to Simon Rattle’s Beethoven Symphonies. It is strange but my work is not as good as it otherwise is if I write when music is playing. I tend to get up and start conducting and get carried…
Fresh Air
After days of trying to get the images into pdf to read at 300dpi, as they were scanned, and not as 150dpi as they arrive in America, I thought the morning walk would clear my head a bit. It was very windy this morning, the ground was wet from overnight rain, the fields sinking in…
Friends
There is something in the voice. The link with memory and shared experience. The moments of laughter, sadness, the inbuilt strength of knowing how someone else thinks, how they act, recognizing their walk from the far end of the street. In the mass of strangers all of whom are friends to someone, this person is…
China
I see that China is considering a new law to be discussed this April to outlaw the killing and eating of cats and dogs. “We are proposing that all dog and cat eating should be banned because it is causing many social problems,” said Chang Jiwen, a law professor at the Chinese Academy. I have…
Trees
How well I remember as a child climbing trees. Always scared the higher I climbed but always looking at the next large bough and wondering what it would feel like to sit on it and how far I would be able to see. Then gripping it tightly as if my life depended upon it when…
Horace Walpole
I am not usually given to quotes and quoting. I very rarely read biographies though some notable human beings are worth knowing about and many who are not well known should come more to our attention. Horace probably isn’t a man I would have known well. He loved things Gothic and whilst his father was…
The Adventure of Self Publishing
I think twenty eight years, two agents and several ideas taken with no thank yous, give me the right to feel that self publishing through the publish on demand model, is the way for me to go. And having uploaded the files ready for CreateSpace to review and send proofs, I though I would reflect…
Dogs
respond to love. My mother has often asked what do we do with our dogs, they come to us as puppies or rescued adult dogs all quiet and well trained and after a while we have a bunch of characters walking around with us. And they are all different. Our terrier who was abandoned on…
Patronage
What can art give the rich? Actually nothing more than it gives us all. Some people becoming wealthy turn to patronage of the arts because they have the money to pay for the art works and places to exhibit them. But the energy of the creative force in the artist, the place where men get…