My Love Is Like To Ice My love is like to ice, and I to fire: How comes it then that this her cold so great Is not dissolved through my so hot desire, But harder grows the more I her entreat? Or how comes it that my exceeding heat Is not allayed by…
W H Auden
The Unknown Citizen (To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State) He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be One against whom there was no official complaint, And all the reports on his conduct agree That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,…
Exams and Playtime
There is a report out that suggests that exam results are poorer if the exams are held during big football events. Never having been a follower of sport I don’t exactly see the importance but I can see several things about this that show how weak our priorities are becoming. For those who don’t revise…
December, December
There was a time I could have started a chat about December with a welcome to the month of Christmas but marketing means it is more like welcome to the third and final month of Christmas. I recall seeing a TV show about the Amazon and some rain-forest tribesmen coming across a wild bee hive…
Too Tiny To Notice
You don’t know what you have until you lose it. A way of saying that people are rather ungrateful for the most part and even pretty ignorant for the rest of it. either that or they fail entirely to empathise with the have-nots for what they don’t have. It never ceases to amaze me how…
In Hindsight
I was watching some of the old Al Jolson videos on Youtube and seeing him with a black face except around his mouth I was reminded on the long running and never repeated singing show in the UK called the Black and White Minstrel Show. Putting aside the fact that Al Jolson was a brilliant…
All The Odds Are War
I don’t have to wonder why people go to war, and I don’t actually need much explanation as to the reasons why they start them after agreeing with a general who once observed that the study of war aptly shows they are started for the worst and most nonsensical of reasons. But I have to…
Arguing From Within
I was talking to a friend about ethical systems and was brought up on the fact that as ethics are in my brain, and my brain has evolved through natural selection, any system of ethics is flawed because physics, upon which we are all based, would not recognise ethics being largely governed by forces and…
Everyone’s Art
One of the joys of living is the way in which one can ‘enjoy’ on many levels the art of others. Whatever the medium and almost whatever the age, their minds are available in a wide variety of places. I was talking a long time ago to a painter and I said it is a…
C W Stoneking
I am not one to go to pop concerts, and rarely have visited clubs. I was taken to a club on Wednesday night in London’s Camden to see a singer called C W Stoneking, an Australian who sings like a black American from the 1920s. The crowd were actually well behaved, a few were drunk…