The present owner of the garden next door to me has applied to cram in two starter homes with underground parking. The owner lives two hundred miles away and obviously this application has nothing to do with providing anyone with a home but for making a lot of money out of the increased value of…
Predicting the Future
In a recent rerun of Star Trek some of the dialogue of William Shatner mentioned the ‘first colony’ on some planet ”in 1992′. In the heady space age dawn of 1968 that must have seemed like an achievable and worthwhile goal, and when you think of what 1992 was really like it gives one pause…
Shell Cases
Digging out my mother’s letters to scan I came across a shell casing I had not seen in years. It is pretty big and stand quite happily on its own with a fountain pen in it. It is made of brass and has M Vn on its base. The V being five in Latin. On…
Ethics and Fantasy
There are two broad aspects to all religions. On the one hand there are the stories and texts that tell the story upon which the religion is based and which form the ‘holy writ’ of the original event or events. On the other are the works, redactions and thoughts, of the theologians and others who…
The Stuff Of Nightmares
I doubt there can be more than a very few people in the world who have not experienced nightmares, or pressure dreams that have left them nervous, sweating, unsettled when awaking. Nor do I suppose most of us have not ascribed it to some serious worries in our lives to do with work, family or…
Epics
The great stories of the nations, from Monkey to King Arthur not only often mix religion with mythical times and places, but they describe attributes and characteristics we think of as espousing the best and worst in human beings. They are all there from the Odyssey to Genesis, the Mahabharata to Turkic Shaman tales. And…
Precarious Irrelevance
It is only when tragedy strikes, or in the heat of a crisis, that everything gets stripped away and the people and actions that are really important present themselves to us in brutal clarity. I thought of this when my father got in touch with me last year after ignoring me for thirty years, in…
When It Is Too Late
There has always been much discussion about forgiveness. Even when people come down on the side of being unforgiving they usually do so from a deep sense of injustice or hurt and see the lack of forgiveness as justice. After all countries are appallingly bad at forgiveness which is why they go to war so…
New Birth
I know this isn’t usually an Autumn subject, though Shelley once famously said that ‘If Winter Comes can Spring be far behind?’, but having now been accepted by my friend’s two year old son to the extent I have been cuddled and then had a mouthful of juice spat in my face (Oh how I…
Life On Life
It is, of course, almost an adage whilst being wholly true, that life feeds upon life. We may argue about its efficacy, its ethics and even the desirability of the facts but none-the-less it stands that to live, one thing must predate another. You can take this a bit far by suggesting that microbes that…