A series of poems on the many loves of humanity is coming out later this year. This is love in old age: Your eyes speak of my youth and my hand holds Yours with that ease of emotion only Years can grow; suppleness has changed to folds, Wrinkles crease our nakedness, laughingly The young…
How To Write a Masterpiece
There seem to be two main ways to choose the subject matter to a work that will be considered a masterpiece. In the first you choose a huge subject filled with human suffering and triumph with a protagonist or main characters that many people may associate with even though they have no direct experience of…
Stress And The Single Mind
I was feeling in need of doing something different today from the editing and home bound lifestyle that seems to rule my days so I went into the garden on a warm sunny afternoon and weeded around the roses. I have always known that doing something ‘physical’ if you spend most of your life using…
Underlying Management
I have often wondered about how one kind of evolved brain could hold so many contrary options about the same things given the same senses and facts. Why is one person’s brain socially minded and another not so. I think the underlying ways in which assumptions are laid down in human thinking is one of the…
Income Taxes
Income tax started in the UK when the Government found itself fighting the French and needing the money to do it. Quite apart from holding in suspicion anything that is started because of war, and recognising the present society is far more sophisticated in its wlefare, policing and other areas than the society of of…
Lovers’ Wars
It seems to me we choose our wars quite carefully but there are a series of ways in which they remind me of experiencing love-making: The heat of battle attracts the young. They are full of the thinking that takes offence easily, stands beneath a flag, fights for a cause. They have the energy wars…
The Moment Of Revolt
With the events in North Africa and Arabia unfolding, I am reminded of the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s seemingly sparked by one event but all revolutions though the event itself seems furious and spontaneous, have deep roots. Oppression is defined by extremes – extremes of poverty, lack of power, lack of legal redress…
The Primrose
The Primrose (Primula veris or vulgaris) is an unassuming flower that suggests yellow in its petals buoyed up by a rosette of green, crinkly leaves, and grows in hedges and woods. There used to be right up to the First World War a Primrose Day in the UK in memory of Benjamin Disareli because this…
The Art of TV Comedy
I was brought up on the second wave of black and white comedies to come over to the UK from America and thence the colour ones. Besides I Love Lucy which my mother thought hilarious (and some of the stuff Lucille did took a huge amount of practice and stage craft) I was a child…
Affirmation
It’s a strange business listening to my mother go over the same things time-and-time again in her illness. To ask the same questions during the day and across the weeks. I wonder what her mind is seeking and why her mind cannot retain the answers any more. This is not the repetition of teaching the young,…