The brilliant and original George Orwell was disenchanted with his own class in English society and thought that the working classes embodied the values he wanted to live amongst. He was disenchanted to find they did not. In fact the values he espoused are not to be found anywhere in a strata of society –…
Category: Quotidial
Vesuvius
Many years ago when I was a child my aunt went to Italy and came back from visiting Vesuvius the volcano (which was and may still be giving off smoke) and in her memorabilia she had a piece of natural glass. It is a misshapen, chunky, slightly pale pink in places, hard lump of glass…
Positive Misunderstanding
I do have an understanding of the calmly, unpretentious religious people of the world and rather like this joke. The Jews of Rome were going to be expelled and they asked the Pope to allow them to stay and after some deliberation with his Cardinals he agreed to let them stay if they could defeat…
Adult Humour
I am a fan of hilarious one-line jokes. I put a skylight in my apartment recently – the people upstairs are furious. Of course things are always in the last place you look. You don’t find something and then say I’ll just take another look over there. Why do elephants have corrugated feet? To give…
What Is It For a Sentence To Be ‘True’?
Philosophers discuss at length what truth in a sentence means. Not, as you might expect, a circular argument since they are presumably using sentences to discuss the matter. In a way what they are trying to gauge and understand is what, if anything, is assumed in allowing us to communicate at all with words. One…
This Time Of Year
I never thought of using a weblog as a diary but this week has been divided equally between some lovely warm weather followed by a few chilly days mixed with rain. The farmers were our last week spreading nitrogen onto the grass for a quick growth burst ready for cutting in June if the weather…
One-Upmanship
I know we all try to do it one way or another. The subtlest way I know is used by artists of all kinds, who try to promote their own art form over-and-above all others. Perhaps not so subtle now I come to think about it. Musicians who cite the voice and song as the…
Mirror Mirror On The Wall
For the greater part of human history the only people who knew exactly what we looked like as individuals were other people. When the best we could do for mirrors were bowls of various metals filled with clear water, or still pools which give a slightly concave or convex view of our faces we never…
Nonsense
There are many assumptions that come to us in our education because a close reading is not given to the facts even as we know them. And let’s face it when the protagonists have been dead two thousand years it is hard to know what we know. For example would it interest you to know…
Everything You Are
There is an art to everything. A way of handling tools, be they physical or philosophical, that comes with practice, learned skills built upon inborn acuity. There is something interesting about watching any animal doing something well and especially seeing human beings perfecting something in their lives. Be it a fine dancer, a fine chef or…