I made the train journey to London over night the past two days with one change of a shirt for a meeting. The train up, contrary to many things I have been told, was straightforward and easy even to the underground in London. The journey back was a touch more complicated as I had to…
Author: Daniel
Why A School?
In World War Two every child in the major cities of the UK was evacuated an the small ones who stayed with their parents spent many nights underground to protect them. It seems absurd to me after months that a school in Gaza would still be a school or that a single child would be…
Never Talk to the Police
I have just listened to an American defence attorney and a veteran investigator for the Venice Beach police about being a suspect. Both men said that the instinct of the innocent is to answer questions asked by the police but the advice is to never say a word. The reason they gave is very simple:…
When I read
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…
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…