Last month across India they celebrated Diwali and in a few days in the UK we are firing off fireworks left,right and centre to remember Guy Fawkes and later this November is Thanksgiving in the USA. Throughout the year there are thousands of celebrations all over the world which aim, apart from making lonely people…
Leap of Faith
One of the most significant developments in the written word was the placing of a space after each word. Something you would not even think about today but it does make all the difference to the ease of reading. But the difference between what we don’t think about because it seems so natural, and when…
Knowledge Of Others
When I was learning about Gandhi it was a critique of his method to say that he knew the British. If he had been seeking freedom from the Nazi mentality thousands would have died in like fashion to the massacre at Amritsar. Gandhi it was said, knew his enemy and in this knowledge lay the…
Let Me Not To The Marriage Of True Minds
Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although…
The Seriousness of Comedy
They say that to play the piano badly but nonetheless take the audience and tune with you, you actually need to be a very good pianist. Likewise in a world where there is little true comedy it takes someone who knows about the seriousness of life to pull out the nuggets of laughter and show…
History Bites
Galileo warned the catholic church that if they insisted that the sun went around the Earth and evidence irrefutably proved the Earth went around the sun it was the catholic church that would end up looking stupid. No matter the power they had to limit the dissemination of his proofs and over his own life,…
The Old Man Of The Sea
The old man of the sea is an ancient Eastern story that has many versions but the simplest of all goes something like this. There is a young sailor walking the cliff paths who happens upon an old beggar sitting by the path, wizened and small, who asks the sailor if he would give him…
Retirement
It is little wonder the population think they have limited power when they work for forty years towards one goal only to have the money they set aside and the goal move due to circumstance and government. One wonders what the governments were doing with all the money their populations were earning for decades that…
One Step Forward We All Fall Down
I have been following (it seems for most of my life) the paroxysms of the Conservative Party over Europe. Stemming as they do from men and women who live in history, the ineluctable arguments to leave the European Union bubble up through the ranks on a regular basis, spewing out on the floor of the…
Walter Savage Landor
Rose Aylmer AH, what avails the sceptred race! Ah, what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep, but never see, A night of memories and sighs I consecrate to thee.