The first crocus is out (purple in my garden) and the snowdrops have lasted a long time this year probably because just as they wanted to come out it got a bit colder again. Still they have made a pleasant show next to my mother’s sick bed. The daffodils are growing tall and the bushes…
Month: March 2010
The Plague Of Guns
I always thought it a sad fact when reading history of the times people have faced what to them were insurmountable odds, or lost a worthy fight against disease or an army, whilst all the time their salvation existed. They just didn’t know about it. For example the much lionised Roman Army that never gave…
The Exalted Gate
At the very centre of the powerful Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, was the seat of Government and entrance to the vast, rambling palace in Istanbul, populated by high officials. Most significant in this series of buildings was a gate that didn’t even belong to the palace but was built across the street: the Bâb-ï-’Ali, or the…
Morning Walks
Getting up as 6 am when it is still a little dusky in Cornwall and going with the dogs around the fields in the quiet before anyone but the farmers are awake. Walking around a seeing more and more as the light strengthens, picking up the odd large piece of timber fallen from a dying…
Can We Control Ourselves?
An oubliette was a highly inaccessible small hiding place rather akin to our innermost thoughts. What really drives people to do anything they do? When women say they want children are they following their rational, thought-out side or their hormones working on their rational thought-out side? When men get het-up about other men and want…
Human Rights
We give them to ourselves. We decide what we consider helps us get along with each other, and then we make it a right. This also keeps us all aiming for similar things and working in a more or less culturally linear fashion. Then, when someone upsets us, we can loudly proclaim that we have…
How We Change It Around
I remember listening to David Attenborough talking about filming nature and wild animals. He was discussing being honest and how ‘certain’ (Walt Disney) film makers had portrayed animals as they never were for the sake of the story or camera or appealing to audiences preconceptions. So famously in the Disney nature films the lemmings leaping…
Hilarious Press Conference
Cartoon I love the cartoon we chose for publicity and I think Jackie’s animation of it is perfect.
Let’s Talk To The Dead
It is big business in some part of the UK so attend meetings where someone starts talking to deceased people. The techniques involved in pretending to do this are well documented not the least by Erik Weisz (Harry Houdini) who spent years trying to talk to his mother and called all such Mediums charlatans. But…
Montrose
In a few months I will be publishing my first thriller, though it actually was the second thriller I ever write. My agent back in 1990 said I had to write three and I did so though in the two years he was my agent he never got me taken. My first thriller was about…