Teenage wilderness
Perhaps the road junction was a meeting place. A side road turns off a once busy main road, the verges on each side of the junction have concrete kerbstones. Two or three yards down the country road, there sat two teenage boys dressed in tee shirts and jeans. Deep in conversation, they were indifferent to the occasional passing vehicle. It … [continue reading …]
Burning your own house down
There seems to be an atavistic streak within some of the people of Northern Ireland that drives them to destroy their own communities. Bonfires that deface neighbourhoods, petrol bombs, rioting, the hi-jacking and burning of vehicles; the capacity for self-harm has never gone away. News of the violence surrounding the 12th July commemorations hardly merited more than a footnote to … [continue reading …]
Baffled by the Conservatives
He came to open the school fete one summer. There was an excitement about his visit. English members of parliament had large constituencies of eighty thousand or more voters. The expectations of their constituents were that members of parliament were to do their work in parliament. If one had a problem with which it was thought they might be able … [continue reading …]
TELEGRAPHIC TRANSFER NOTICE ,
This was spammed by Google. It is very amateurish. Zenith Bank (UK) Ltd 39 Cornhill London EC3V 3ND United Kingdom tel: +44 70 8646 8527 Fax:+447043071539 Dear Esteemed Customer, TELEGRAPHIC TRANSFER NOTICE. We are hereby officially notify you concerning your fund Telegraphic Transfer through our bank, Zenith Bank (UK) Ltd United Kingdom, to your bank account, which has been officially … [continue reading …]
Glastonbury romance
The walls of a circular room at the county museum in Taunton are inscribed with comments on Somerset and its people. Quotes from famous writers include words that are pejorative as well as ones more complimentary, words from unexpected sources appear, among them a comment from John Steinbeck, who stayed in the east Somerset town of Bruton in 1959: The … [continue reading …]
Sunday thoughts for 22nd July 2018
Had Jesus lived in the Twenty-First Century and not the First Century, would it have been possible for him to have done things the way he did? A Twenty First Century Jesus would be surrounded by staff: a personal assistant, an office manager, a public relations officer, researchers, consultants, and a string of others. Should that seem implausible, look at … [continue reading …]
Heavy thinking
The obituary in today’s Financial Times spoke of the subject’s association with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. A time wil come when it will no longer be possible to cite the names of the Twentieth Century’s most famous philosophers to testify to the credibility of a person as a thinker. It is almost forty years since the death of Sartre … [continue reading …]
No more sounds of silence
A diminutive figure in a red tee-shirt and black trousers, he stood alone in a pool of light. Sixty thousand people watched each move, listened to each guitar chord, pondered each word sung. This would be the last opportunity. Paul Simon was making his last and final concert appearance in England and closing not with a crescendo of sound and … [continue reading …]
Writing unsuccessfully
An advertisement appeared on Twitter for novel writing software. Given that there are said to be only six plots in fiction and that every novel is a variation or combination of one or more of the six, it was presumably not hard to devise a computer package that incorporated all the possible permutations. But wouldn’t a novel produced using software … [continue reading …]