You don’t know what you have until you lose it. A way of saying that people are rather ungrateful for the most part and even pretty ignorant for the rest of it. either that or they fail entirely to empathise with the have-nots for what they don’t have. It never ceases to amaze me how…
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In Hindsight
I was watching some of the old Al Jolson videos on Youtube and seeing him with a black face except around his mouth I was reminded on the long running and never repeated singing show in the UK called the Black and White Minstrel Show. Putting aside the fact that Al Jolson was a brilliant…
All The Odds Are War
I don’t have to wonder why people go to war, and I don’t actually need much explanation as to the reasons why they start them after agreeing with a general who once observed that the study of war aptly shows they are started for the worst and most nonsensical of reasons. But I have to…
Arguing From Within
I was talking to a friend about ethical systems and was brought up on the fact that as ethics are in my brain, and my brain has evolved through natural selection, any system of ethics is flawed because physics, upon which we are all based, would not recognise ethics being largely governed by forces and…
Everyone’s Art
One of the joys of living is the way in which one can ‘enjoy’ on many levels the art of others. Whatever the medium and almost whatever the age, their minds are available in a wide variety of places. I was talking a long time ago to a painter and I said it is a…
C W Stoneking
I am not one to go to pop concerts, and rarely have visited clubs. I was taken to a club on Wednesday night in London’s Camden to see a singer called C W Stoneking, an Australian who sings like a black American from the 1920s. The crowd were actually well behaved, a few were drunk…
I Want To Be Famous
Of course we can always say that if you want to write part and parcel of being successful is to be well known. I knew that when I began to write when I was 21. It isn’t so much what one does, as how one handles oneself in the event of success. And we all…
John Donne
THE FLEA. MARK but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is ; It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be. Thou know’st that this cannot be said A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ; Yet this enjoys…
John Wilmot
Return Absent from thee, I languish still; Then ask me not, When I return? The straying fool ’twill plainly kill To wish all day, all night to mourn. Dear, from thine arms then let me fly, That my fantastic mind may prove The torments it deserves to try, That tears my fix’d heart from my…
The Smallest things
Some people can take immense pleasure from the smallest things. My mother is one such. No matter how hard the day or how great life’s problems, even when she was homeless, seeing a butterfly or the first ladybird so she could make a wish, brings a smile to her face. I always think of such…