I met a psychology student on set yesterday and we talked and while talking I said one of the challenges of research on the human brain is to find out why we make up stories about what it is to be human. She asked me what we had made up. I immediately replied god then…
Author: Daniel
The Most Difficult Task
I decided almost as soon as she died tow rite my mother’s life story. But for it to be a literary biography, while the day-to-day inquiry may be left to future historians of English poetry, I was helped by her own writings about her childhood and life, by hundreds of letters from husbands, friends and…
The Politics Of Jobs
We are all familiar with the odd fact that people who use their brains more than their bodies tend to get paid more (lawyers over factory workers for example) which instantly should give one to understand using ones brain is seen as more significant than using one’s body. Though the anomaly is that using ones…
Lying for a Purpose
I have often wondered why people lie. I am told it is because it works, it hides embarrassment, it comes with an agenda, all of which means we gain something and that something is positive for us. I have thought about this this past ear because clicking through the news outlets I am struck continually,…
Availability
We are all sued to making ourselves available for work and the stresses and strains of being equally available to close family. Time, it appears, while not actually existing in the wider sense is very much all we have in our own sense. And it is that time, our time, that seems to me to…
The Religious Mind
I was asked once who did I look to for authority as I was an atheist. It was an interesting questions because I had never looked further than my upbringing. I had read English poets and poets in translation, I had read most of the famous writers of Europe and dissected their knowledge of the…
Memorials
Abraham Lincoln said it better than anyone at Gettysburg when he pointed out that while one mourns the dead, the best way to respect them is to fight on for what they believed and see their greatest dreams realised. “But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground….
There IUs No Such Thing As Good and Evil
There are just human beings. There is so satan and no god and no eternal cosmic battle, there is just an intelligent ape-like being grappling with its actions and not doing very well. Ascribing its actions to beings of immense divinity and power obscures the rationale it gives itself for certain actions. It foregoes any…
Pricing Art
I was interested recently when an artist and critic priced a painting by an unknown artist at £2000. The painting was a late work. While in an auction eight years ago a painting by the same artist when he was a young man was priced at most at £250. The former was pricing the work…
Resets
The United Kingdom has a problem: the extreme racist vote of Brexit is still holding its trade back at a time when trade is seen as the only way to dig itself out of the hole privatisation has placed it in. Investment has not been as big as it needed to be from the private…