I see that China is considering a new law to be discussed this April to outlaw the killing and eating of cats and dogs. “We are proposing that all dog and cat eating should be banned because it is causing many social problems,” said Chang Jiwen, a law professor at the Chinese Academy. I have…
Trees
How well I remember as a child climbing trees. Always scared the higher I climbed but always looking at the next large bough and wondering what it would feel like to sit on it and how far I would be able to see. Then gripping it tightly as if my life depended upon it when…
Horace Walpole
I am not usually given to quotes and quoting. I very rarely read biographies though some notable human beings are worth knowing about and many who are not well known should come more to our attention. Horace probably isn’t a man I would have known well. He loved things Gothic and whilst his father was…
The Adventure of Self Publishing
I think twenty eight years, two agents and several ideas taken with no thank yous, give me the right to feel that self publishing through the publish on demand model, is the way for me to go. And having uploaded the files ready for CreateSpace to review and send proofs, I though I would reflect…
Dogs
respond to love. My mother has often asked what do we do with our dogs, they come to us as puppies or rescued adult dogs all quiet and well trained and after a while we have a bunch of characters walking around with us. And they are all different. Our terrier who was abandoned on…
Patronage
What can art give the rich? Actually nothing more than it gives us all. Some people becoming wealthy turn to patronage of the arts because they have the money to pay for the art works and places to exhibit them. But the energy of the creative force in the artist, the place where men get…
Sun Worshippers
I have to admit that apart from the debacle of human sacrifice, those scientifically challenged people’s actually did manage to highlight the fount of all life on Earth. That it isn’t sentient hardly seems to matter, and that there are millions of suns in the Universe doesn’t really matter either. Without it we have no…
Electric Cigarettes
They do exist. As my friend tells me there is a whole ritual around cigarette smoking that includes alleviating one’s stress and goes through the feel of the packet, the buying and lighting up, the inhaling and even the satisfaction of seeing the thing burning away. Electric cigarettes are there to help you and very…
If
If everyone in the world vanished in an instant and you were the only person left, how much of civilisation would be safe in your hands? I asked myself this question after reading Immanual Kant and the idea that ethical behaviour may be described as those actions anyone would do in the same situation. To…
Music
There were three occasions when I was a teenager when for no reason I could imagine, I heard pieces of music that triggered something in my brain and I could no longer feel my body at all for a few seconds. They all occurred when I was sixteen to seventeen and I have ascribed them…