This is a short book written by Michael Fairless who supposedly lived rough in the early 1900s. One of the stories in it is about a young Irish couple, poor but happy and how the man sits beneath an autumn tree with his future wife and promises her a wedding dress and throws all around…
Category: Quotidial
2,000 Years Ago
I remember many years ago waxing lyrical as a student about the glories of Greece and the lesser glories of Rome when someone turned and said they couldn’t have much respect for slave cultures. As someone who had loved the story of Spartacus and thought the two lines he was given in the syllabus a…
Junk History
I have not written a large amount of historical work but the scripts and plays I have done have been guided by my adherence to known history. Having just watched 300 and seen the ludicrous computer generated battles I smiled, but the speeches were next to awful in as far as they made the Spartans…
Fame
When communities are small there is hardly room for fame because everyone knows everyone else anyway. And as communities grow from valley to valley or place to place names may be well known of people who are special in some way or of use, but the kind of fame we accept as fame today would…
Fairystories
There is something wonderfully appealing about fairystories. In the anodyne ones we have today the good usually triumph, the princes are often heroes, weddings are always between two people in love and some magical folk exist who are here especially to help humans get things right. It is a way of telling stories that film…
Gnostics
When I first read about the Gnostic beliefs I found them compelling and it did not surprise me that the early Christian church hunted the Gnostics down until they were all but wiped out. New born religions are often aggressive, it seems to be a concomitant of that enthusiasm which infuses the acolytes. The Gnostic…
There’s Always Something
I am formatting, upgrading and installing an OS on my friend’s computer which has lain idle for a few years and no matter how well I planned in advance, there is always something that stops the whole process being a smooth one. Whether it is compatibility issues or DLLs that don’t quite work with the…
Sitting In Trees
There is something serene, slightly dangerous and utterly compelling about sitting in the crown of large old or strong young tree. They have to be strong these days as I am slightly heavier than when I was a child, though compared to a mighty Yew or ancient Oak we are never anything but children. Some…
The Weakest Make Us Strong
I have always subscribed to the belief that had I been young in 1916 I would have been a Communist eager to free the serfs and build a just society in Russia and I would have been one of the first to be shot when Lenin destroyed the ideal by creating a dictatorship. I am…
Misplacement
Whilst we can easily justify our search for ways to tame nature because of nature’s inherent dangers, in recent history most of our efforts have centered on protecting ourselves from each other. at first glance it isn’t perhaps of great moment why we achieve the discoveries we achieve as long as we achieve them, but…