When the battle of Waterloo was on a knife edge the Prussians who had been watching came in on the British side thereby giving them their narrow victory, and setting in train a whole century of British supremacy in the world. One of the things the explorers who sailed round the world wanted to find…
Category: Quotidial
Single Community
There is a tension in the way people think between the fascination and epic quality of one person representing great and noble qualities in a lone life; from the knights errant of the Europe to the Ronin of the East taking in Gurus along the way; against the need to be in a community. It…
Running Out Of Space
The present owner of the garden next door to me has applied to cram in two starter homes with underground parking. The owner lives two hundred miles away and obviously this application has nothing to do with providing anyone with a home but for making a lot of money out of the increased value of…
Predicting the Future
In a recent rerun of Star Trek some of the dialogue of William Shatner mentioned the ‘first colony’ on some planet ”in 1992′. In the heady space age dawn of 1968 that must have seemed like an achievable and worthwhile goal, and when you think of what 1992 was really like it gives one pause…
Shell Cases
Digging out my mother’s letters to scan I came across a shell casing I had not seen in years. It is pretty big and stand quite happily on its own with a fountain pen in it. It is made of brass and has M Vn on its base. The V being five in Latin. On…
Ethics and Fantasy
There are two broad aspects to all religions. On the one hand there are the stories and texts that tell the story upon which the religion is based and which form the ‘holy writ’ of the original event or events. On the other are the works, redactions and thoughts, of the theologians and others who…
The Stuff Of Nightmares
I doubt there can be more than a very few people in the world who have not experienced nightmares, or pressure dreams that have left them nervous, sweating, unsettled when awaking. Nor do I suppose most of us have not ascribed it to some serious worries in our lives to do with work, family or…
Epics
The great stories of the nations, from Monkey to King Arthur not only often mix religion with mythical times and places, but they describe attributes and characteristics we think of as espousing the best and worst in human beings. They are all there from the Odyssey to Genesis, the Mahabharata to Turkic Shaman tales. And…
Precarious Irrelevance
It is only when tragedy strikes, or in the heat of a crisis, that everything gets stripped away and the people and actions that are really important present themselves to us in brutal clarity. I thought of this when my father got in touch with me last year after ignoring me for thirty years, in…
When It Is Too Late
There has always been much discussion about forgiveness. Even when people come down on the side of being unforgiving they usually do so from a deep sense of injustice or hurt and see the lack of forgiveness as justice. After all countries are appallingly bad at forgiveness which is why they go to war so…