This week the British Government recognised along with a good many other countries, the Libyan opposition as the legitimate leadership. At the same time the British Government says nothing about aspirations around the world of small peoples who are not rebelling against their own leadership because actually, it is not their own. Why do we…
Category: Quotidial
Brinkmanship
Watching the American arguments on Capitol Hill about the budget has been (for a foreigner) a dispiriting and banal experience. The arguments surrounding the life-blood of the American people (money) take place with hardly any real thought about what those people are suffering. It is not usual for us to think of American’s suffering, or…
Family Secrets
I was talking to a friend this last weekend about writing things that are true about one’s family and she commented that some of the information constituted to her siblings ‘family secrets’ and of course, no other family has ever gone through what they went through so best to keep it secret. She was not…
City Driving
My Garmin has made driving in London easy, as if I had a cabbie in my car and what with air conditioning on a hot day one could almost say it makes the experience pleasurable. But I have heard people say that if you use one then you can be tracked and ‘they’ know where…
Education, Education, Education
I never really thought Tony Blair was a good or even an interesting speaker though apparently most of the country did. I am however interested in the ongoing debate for paying for university education on the basis that what is paid is a small percentage of the increase in salary a university graduate may expect…
The Human Censor
I was very interested to learn that Hollywood had a pre-censor era of film making going up to about 1933, after which a host of rules came into force about what was and was not allowed to be shown in films. What interested me was not the actual rules but the fact that it was…
Resonance
Many years ago I had a teacher who loved driving vintage buses and there was a warehouse filled with them in Devon he would visit all the time. He used to have pictures of the buses fully restored and recordings of the sounds. Being a musician and organist for his church I thought he must…
Meme
This is a word coined by Richard Dworkins to describe “the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” I used to call these things fads and sometimes ‘in vogue’ but I think he is aiming at an idea that may not be as transitory. As a child I had no…
Fighting Tyranny
In Hans Fallada’s almost pedestrian and normal look at Nazism and ordinary people, Alone in Berlin, he relates the true story of a working class couple who take to distributing anonymous post cards carefully inscribed with anti Nazi sentiments around the city. An act that went on for three years every week and finally cost…
The Art Of The Apology
It seems to me impossible to live through a week in today’s world without someone apologising for something. From the big ones, like nations apologising to nations, and races to races, to the minor ones run in newspapers of partners apologising to each other and now we see newspapers having to apologise to people. And…