On the one hand it is almost criminal that we have to spend so much of life sleeping, on the other sleep is a marvelous renewal. Which is why no doubt so many people have such brilliant ideas when they sleep and wake up raring to go and finish whatever it they have yet to…
The Financial Crisis
The planet earth and every single atom of organic and inorganic life on it, was a free gift to humanity. In fact pretty much a free gift to all sentient beings. The biggest free lunch we could conceive of before we conceived of blasting off into the wider Universe where the only thing that will…
Our Priorities Are The State’s Priorities
Desmond Morris was very interesting in his series and book ‘Man Watching’ because he looked behind what we do, to put it into the context of what all animals do. And modern science has begun to show us how richly our actions are determined by glands excreting hormones in our bodies prior too reason getting…
Truth In Language
What is it to be able to say that truth exists in language? Is it more than that language makes some kind of sense to us because they are structured? And that if they veer off the road of sense then they must be false? Put another way, if a sentence follows the rules of…
How Fire Made Water
Sometimes we can understand something better if we look at its opposite, or simply look at it in contrast to something else of a similar or dissimilar nature. After all our understanding of what a lie is, is based heavily on our understanding of what truth it. Many years ago when I worked for a…
The Art Of the ‘Thing’
There is a great debate amongst commentators on the arts, as to whether you can separate the artists from what they create, whether, for example, a painting can be looked at as just a painting or whether you need to know about he artist in order to appreciate it. Now obviously you can look at…
Fulminar The Good Magician
The first book I ever wrote for children, begun when I started revising for my degree, was a little too like C.S.Lewis according to the agents, so I had to write something slightly different. The result was Fulminar The Good Magician which is about a special magician come to earth to rescue some stolen, magical…
Characters
Myrtle was an old lady when I met her. We lived in the seaside village of Looe in Cornwall and she was our next door neighhbour, in the days when having a thin wall between you and a neighbour didn’t mean you heard their music blaring through your house at all hours. She actually told…
The Questions Of Life
Long ago in a cave on a mountain in the Himalayas a sage thought that the answer to the question of why we are here was ‘to ask questions’. His fellow sage thought that such questions were fatuous as reason was a human faculty not a natural one and nature never asks why. The third…
Set In Stone
We always used to go places as a family and end up coming home with something to remind us of where we had been. Rarely was it something you could buy. When the motorbike and sidecar broke down in Hertfordshire we sat in a field and I strung a load of acorns together in necklaces….