I have often looked and seen in nature programmes what biologists think is animals playing but there is no animal who plays and seeks out entertainments as often as human beings. Partly as a result of our brains needing to learn how to ‘game’, and partly because team work is a learned skill and games…
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The Art of Spying
Ever since a human being had to confront another human being the practices of spying must have been around: how to size up your opponent, think ahead of time what they might do, out-think what they are actually doing. I know that most people think of spying as something Governments do against each other, and…
Shänne Sands
Emily Brontë On bleak Yorkshire nights, As winter’s air soured your broken chest Did you turn to your sisters and that brother Who, drunk and slightly mad, still make you smile – Did you discover through them what it was like to love? You were not touched by any man, You are not passion-sucked…
Marriage
My sister used to moan about how marriage was just a certificate imposed upon us by a state ruled by the machinations of a defunct religion, and in fact if you love someone you will stay with them and have children with them and that is the marriage; the staying together. I actually agree with…
The Mad Hatter
One of the brilliant things about writers is the way many of them have tapped into the sentiments or imaginations not just of their own generation but of all generations since they were writing, and we may suppose for many generations to come. Every country can boast its favourite cartoon, its greatest villain its fondest…
Clothes Make Us
I have always loved the feel of new clothes, and I come from a mother who always washed clothes before allowing anyone to wear them. The interesting thing about the Adam and Eve story in the Bible is the fact they felt a sudden sense of nakedness and how they did not wish to be…
Mirror Mirror On The Wall
I am told we are wired up in our brains to be attracted to a particular kind of look which we will find ‘beautiful’. They have done a lot of work with symmetry and facial features to try to pin down what all the elements of beauty actually are but basically sex is facilitated by…
The Myopia Of Privilege
I often wonder when exactly the perverse ability of human beings to ignore another person’s suffering or to become blind to other people entirely, begins or arises? How the Roman gentry walked around their cities oblivious to the drudgery of slaves all around them, buying and selling human beings without a thought to anything but…
The Simplest Thing
I don’t think the wheel is a simple invention by any stretch of the imagination, in fact it is quite a piece of technology not only to think of it but to make, even the first stone versions, but placing a space between individual words is probably the simplest thing one could ever think of,…
The Fatal Fantasy
I once heard a description of human beings as the only animal that believes its myth about itself. This is a striking comment, some may even say, damming of the intellect of the human race but then the intellect of the human race has always been the intellect of the few. The human race is…