of artists whose work fetched $180,000 a few years ago getting $10,000 today, or multi-millionaires drowning on their superyachts which is, when you think abut it, what anyone could do in a storm at sea, or the difficulties of keeping the financial system on track when by its very nature it is a boom-bust cycle…
Month: August 2024
Perhaps More Thought
should be given to human beings in war. There are those who thrive on it and enjoy battle. The British army says after a conflict there is always a higher than usual retirement of personnel which has always been the case. Those who know what war looks like never want to experience it again. In…
Innocence
Innocence Our innocence was kept in a blue vase – Holding chrysanthemums with heavy heads – Or over gas fires making toast and reading Flecker Or lying on narrow beds comfortable with happiness – Books littered with petals and ‘notes’ About coming ‘home’ late – Piping a recorder in the dusk of that autumn,…
Talent
I read in the 1980s about a French singer who had a wonderful, evocative voice who was not well known. The reason being her voice sounded very much like Edith Piaf and, of course, France already had Edith Piaf they didn’t need another. Or rather the record studios and those who owned Edith’s rights didn’t…
Unexpected but clever
It is a very interesting and clever slight of intellectual hands to take an animal that could not have survived against the wild beasts of the world unless it worked together as a team, and make that animal think it is in a culture where working for its individual aims is not only in its…
What They Won’t Say
Despite the legal articles on genocide being very clear on intent, the charge is still inveighed against the Israeli military in Gaza. In 1945 the Allies felt they had seen something new which needed to be defined and they decided that the deliberate attempt in whole or in part to massacre an entire ethnic group…
Too Simple
Simples, were at one time, the pure element sample used by alchemists. One can see how that transferred to a general meaning of simple – not complex. This would appear to be a change of use or an additional meaning that often happens in language. Simplifying langue is also a natural occurrence as we dropped…
Regime
When you break your routine and get up at say, 5 am and listen to the radio and look at the dawn you see and hear a quite different world to one you are used to. Radio 4 doesn’t run overnight so they join up with the BBC World Service and you hear al kinds…
Inventions
What is the single most important invention of the human race? By important do you mean the best, the most pervasive, the most used, the longest in existence? I mean what is the most ubiquitous invention in the entire history of the human race? That’s easy: money. #money
A spoken poem
Cosmic Time By me