I love children’s fairytales though the traditional ones have a longer history than as merely bedtime stories read aloud by parents to wide-eyed children fantasising about magic and witches. In their way they were morality tales. In the original story of Sleeping Beauty the prince raped the sleeping princess; Hansel and Gretel is about the…
Classical Language
There is a tendency amongst scholars to ‘hear’ everyone in the old Empires of Greece and Rome, and even Egypt, speaking in pentameters or making lofty Ciceronian comments on the malaise of the times. A little akin to expecting our present day leaders to all sound like Shakespeare’s Henry Fifth. Many years ago in Egypt…
The Hours Of The Day
In the morning the air is fresh and young, the sun prepared to dazzle and amaze unless the clouds are stretching across the sky. Rest has gone and wakefulness comes to the mind but not the eyes and none of the dogs will move before you do. All this has changed by the afternoon. The…
Mysteries Are Happiness
We have a burning need to know, which has produced in large measure our minds – given the interplay between our ability to make connections in our brains and the number of connections that have to be made in order to understand even basic things like how to walk properly in a dense crowd of…
How Do Artists Survive?
I have in passing made distinctions between people who are active in the arts world and people who are Artists. Whether musicians, sculptors, poets etc. Perhaps I should say what I think I know about Artists, in whatever art form they are found. Artists are driven people. If they have other work, if they make…
Such Books As Minds Are Of
We are what we read. It plays both ways of course because there comes a time when we read only what we want too because that seduces our assumptions. But a good deal of how we view the world comes through ideas we may not have had ourselves when we were young, thoughts and opinions…
Catch A Falling Star
I was involved in a discussion about supporting your children in their dreams, no matter what those dreams are. I looked back on my childhood and remember my mother being very positive about all the things I hoped to do, and in the interplay of families I took on a few of her dreams too….
The Bonds Of Thought
Since every human being every born has lived their life on this planet it should not be surprising that people’s around the world have often thought the same things. From gods to tyrants it seems there is a unity in history that crosses the continents and only breaks down when you arrive at isolated tribes…
I Did Not Die, Did You?
The art of acting for me is very much on a stage in front of a living audience that you have to engage for two hours. I do not hold film acting up as the pinnacle of acting or even as very good acting. There are film actors ( a few) I can see would…
Good Morning Mr.Fox
Getting up early these days to take the dogs for a walk – I say dogs but my terrier has decided this is just too early and wraps up on the chair and refuses to move – I have started to see foxes. Or maybe just the one fox, in and around the fields. A…