I shot a couple of short videos with a friend of mine recently and as his wife has just given birth to their second child I suggested taking a video of his son and baby daughter. He did not want to, saying that he could take pictures in frames but moving images only made him…
The Quality Of Touch
I love using my fountain pen. I grew up with ink and pens and never really took to Biro though I can see their usefulness. But even today I still think my neatest and most beautiful writing is done in pencil, because I learned to write in pencil and I can still see myself trying…
Trust Me To Lie
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could tell when someone is lying the way we can with a four year old? “Did you have sex with that women?” “No I didn’t and don’t pay any attention to the woman holding my trousers.” “Of course I never took that bribe and my bank account deposit details…
A Passion For Breathing
We rarely think much about it – letting our lungs just do their thing; but philosophers down the ages and more recently holistic health-practitioners have more and more taught how to concentrate on one’s breathing as a way to settle one’s mind. How many of us I wonder sit at the computer and breath in…
The Perfect Cup Of Tea
The Far East of course has made an art form of preparing, making and serving tea and other drinks. And the exquisite apparatus they use in presentation puts the cheap cups they sell us in our supermarkets here in the UK to shame. I recall my mother saying her father always came in and asked…
How To Argue
We are very passionate about what we ‘believe’, even more passionate about things we have never really questioned or been challenged to think about. It is one of the strengths of a good education that it forces us to assess our thoughts and brings us into discussion with people who do not accept what we…
Forgiveness
It has been discussed in the West for generations that forgiveness is an important, if not often an overriding, characteristic of a civilised person. Being a generalised term this includes forgiveness of all people, or any state, for any crime. Which of course begs the description of what ‘crime’ means, it also requires thought about who…
To Times Found
Every generation believes it is the first to have found love. To know what it is like to breath in and taste the modern world. But as my mother taught me long ago, everyone who has ever lived has been ‘a modern’. On the field of emotions and feelings and experiences nothing is, in fact,…
The Unexpected
As a teenager I was sent to boarding school in Devon some aspects of which I actually enjoyed. Many more I did not. As an older boy I recall, either through a reading club or poetry evening, a boy I knew read Robert Louis Stevenson and was amazed by the poem on his gravestone. I…
Apologies
I have been unable to keep the weblog up to date every day because I (master electronics expert I don’t think) burned a hole in my motherboard without the use of a blow torch. I am told this is something of a feat and apart from the fact it could have all caught fire and…