It is a funny thing about distance. Sometimes we feel that those we love or know are far away because they are in the next town, or the big city or another country. In older days when horses were the only form of speedy travel to be in another county was days away. Now to…
Category: Quotidial
Train Journeys
The first I recall I was 9 on my way home from school in my uniform in those old six seater carriages with white doilies on the head rests. I wanted a cup of tea and when the steward opened the door and announced refreshments were now available this little 9 year old piped up,…
Moving With The Seasons
Birds migrate for warmth and breeding. Vast herds cross snow, ice and rivers across whole continents in time with seasons. Human beings have inhabited the whole Earth but we are not naturally a migratory species. We can make almost any place an all-year-round home. Yet in the past there have been huge tribal migrations as…
Will It Save The World If I Sneeze?
Of course the world needs saving. It has needed saving since forever. Long before whalers would slaughter gentle animals like the giant turtle and sea lion without cease. Before Cicero was appalled at the slaughter of fifty elephants in one games in the Roman Arena, or Seneca had to pretend not to prefer being a…
Light And God
My physics friend at University (don’t laugh we all had one) told me in his text books they a quote ‘And god said…” followed by the four equations Maxwell wrote on the nature of light. It made me think about the relationship between god and science in our minds. Of course if science is correct…
Enid Blyton
I used to love to read Blyton books and vividly remember being bought 3 all at once and feeling myself very rich. Most of the time I had to trawl through the second hand shops (one I remember as the bus ride never stopped there, you had to cross a subway and walk down a…
Mobile History
Human beings love to communicate. It will be one of the great discoveries to find out which came first the voice or the brain. Through stele, scrolls and printing presses to the internet, telephone and radio phone we will develop our ability to communicate easily with each other anywhere in the world and one day…
Bone Flutes
There were, anthropologists tell us, small flutes made of the bones of animals which our distant ancestors used. Along with some kind of drum which seems to be a universal early instrument. But it was a long road from those to Haydn. Like all roads, to Science, to Art, to Society itself, human endeavours are…
If I Could Write . . .
I would of course be brilliant. I would be Zola reborn, I would be deep yet brief like Chekhov, I would be passionate and sparse like Steinbeck, I would be wide-ranging and evocative like Fast. There would be a hint of Byron in my irony and humour, the politics of Mary Ann Evans in my…
Rivers Come And Go
There is great beauty around a tidal river. I grew up with one and getting to know the hours of its high and low tides gives one a knowledge of the phases of the moon. Gives one an appreciation of how boats rise and fall and tip gently when they hit the bottom of the…