I remember when I was around eleven years old I used to come in from school and put on the TV and watch the young children’s programmes, then mine, and not get up until the news came on. I was a year away from exams and I came home one day and the TV had…
Queenie-Colleen
During my mother’s illness she was constantly asking for a puppy she could look after and hold whilst she was bed bound and she particularly wanted a rough collie, because one of the first dogs she ever knew had been a rough collie called Scottie. The first one we found we lost because I couldn’t…
Laugh For Twenty-Five Minutes
I remember when mum was homeless for six months and she took a chalet over the winter to live in. She had an old black and white TV on which every week she watched a British sitcom called It Aint Half Hot Mum. There were times when it was very funny. This was years after…
The Roadmender
This is a short book written by Michael Fairless who supposedly lived rough in the early 1900s. One of the stories in it is about a young Irish couple, poor but happy and how the man sits beneath an autumn tree with his future wife and promises her a wedding dress and throws all around…
2,000 Years Ago
I remember many years ago waxing lyrical as a student about the glories of Greece and the lesser glories of Rome when someone turned and said they couldn’t have much respect for slave cultures. As someone who had loved the story of Spartacus and thought the two lines he was given in the syllabus a…
Junk History
I have not written a large amount of historical work but the scripts and plays I have done have been guided by my adherence to known history. Having just watched 300 and seen the ludicrous computer generated battles I smiled, but the speeches were next to awful in as far as they made the Spartans…
Fame
When communities are small there is hardly room for fame because everyone knows everyone else anyway. And as communities grow from valley to valley or place to place names may be well known of people who are special in some way or of use, but the kind of fame we accept as fame today would…
Fairystories
There is something wonderfully appealing about fairystories. In the anodyne ones we have today the good usually triumph, the princes are often heroes, weddings are always between two people in love and some magical folk exist who are here especially to help humans get things right. It is a way of telling stories that film…
Gnostics
When I first read about the Gnostic beliefs I found them compelling and it did not surprise me that the early Christian church hunted the Gnostics down until they were all but wiped out. New born religions are often aggressive, it seems to be a concomitant of that enthusiasm which infuses the acolytes. The Gnostic…
There’s Always Something
I am formatting, upgrading and installing an OS on my friend’s computer which has lain idle for a few years and no matter how well I planned in advance, there is always something that stops the whole process being a smooth one. Whether it is compatibility issues or DLLs that don’t quite work with the…