Babies of all species have to learn from their parents and their peers. We used to simply have to learn the art of survival, which berries to eat, how to hunt, how to cook, where it was safe to sleep, but the learning experience has become far more sophisticated over the millenniums. Yet like all…
Month: November 2010
Opera
One of my children’s stories, actually one I am quite fond of, has a central character of a child whose singing is creative. Going back to the themes of innocence and times when people were closer to nature. And it was a strange story for me write because I don’t actually like singing very much….
When Nature Calls
It is of course wonderful to live in a place, if not the house, that one truly loves but sometimes when choosing one has to look beyond what one sees to what one suspects or even learns. I remember when digging out the back of the bank to get the soil away from the house,…
Writing In the Dark
Several people I know have asked me how and where I get my ideas and truth to tell if you do a lot of reading, most ideas seem pretty well grounded in human experience. A few seem to go beyond experience and expand upon what we know and a few are far reaches of pure…
Friendship
Rarely has an elegy to friendship been written better: Heraclitus They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead; They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed; I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky. And…
Letters
There is something redolent about letters whether they be to you or ones addressed to others, from the unique handwriting of the writer to the smell of the papers, from the record of addresses to the stamps from all around the world. In such letters you can read about everyday happenings of people long gone,…
After The Rain
I know people in the USA have had severe hurricanes the past week and usually when it hits the East Coast, bad storms sweep across Cornwall, and sure enough we had some wild weather with masses of rain; to be expected at the tail end of autumn. It cleans the trees and brings down the…
The Power Of Land
When the Mongols fanned out from their eastern lands, or the Europeans trail blazed westwards, or in fact any of the great and small tribal migrations happened in human history, it was all about land. Like the horse being introduced into South America by the Spanish crossing into North America finding it to their liking…
Midnight Feast
It is those little things we do when children, almost in innocence, that give us pleasure because they are rarely done, that we feel so much affection for in our lives. I remember lights being out, so reading under the bed covers with a torch; riding down hills on a bicycle though I was not…
From Where I Stand
A nuclear explosion is an horrendous and huge death machine to us, but if you look at what goes on in the stars, to the immense forces at work if we set every nuclear weapon off we could it would look like no more than lighting a match against the night sky. When we look…