It is very tough. Even though one is tired and even though the Government recognises this and had instituted a programme of respite care, giving both the cared for and the carer two weeks away from each other every two months, it is still very hard. When one’s mother doesn’t wish to go, says she…
Ruining Imperfection
My mother is a perfectionist when it comes to her work. She will edit a poem in her head for days before writing it down and once written it is never altered, it doesn’t have to be all the editing has been done. She is like that with everything she does, the depth of thought…
Oh, For The Right Word
It is interesting that academics often create new words (usually from Greek roots in English academics) to explain a concept or train of thought. Nearly always these are an amalgam of two words that bring together two disciplines – it replaces the old hyphened words we used to find a great deal of in academic…
Soothing Hands
My dogs love to be groomed, which is really funny since the small one who came to us seven years ago as a stray has really short hair but you try and leave her out of a brush when she sees the collie being groomed. They both raise their heads and often I have seen…
Motivations and Deviations
I spent a good deal of time as a teenager trying to fathom out why people believed what they believed and how they came to those beliefs. Really I suppose trying to understand what thinking was about. At university I spent some time working out what truth in language is, (something to do with meaning)…
Def Poetry
You don’t have to mind that the world is unrefined; In places skewed like a puppet with too many strings incapable of dancing for itself; You don’t have to mind the few who devour everything and curse the poor for being poor or too sore to work for the rich bitch with the Palm Beach…
And God Made Computers Possible
Though I am beginning to ask myself why. There always seems to be something I should be doing to this machine besides actually working. Whether it is updating drivers to make my hardware care about my software; or updating my software because what was sold to me to begin with was not quite right or…
Hobbies
Hobbyists are not always amateurs, in fact as someone said to me, do anything for fifty years you get reasonably good at it. The importance of hobbies is to have something you enjoy that takes your mind away from other things, to have that time when you concentrate on something ‘else’. Or when in doing…
When War Is An Answer
In the long and bloody battles of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, when half the male population o the UK of fighting age stretching over near twenty years, were slaughtered on land and sea all over Europe, the outcome was a final victory over the French and her Allies for the British and her Allies…
Two Hundred Pieces Of Nonsense
I have been writing these short pieces for two hundred days. In cyberspace this is cause for a celebration though I am pretty sure in the wider world where people think a little more clearly it is probably cause for nothing. I am often very tired when I write as my mother has bad nights…