I started blogging as a requirement of a course I studied with tbe Open University, an MA in Online and Digital Teaching and Learning. Now, having gained that qualification, used it (often in the teeth of opposition from that contradictory organisation where I taught Psychology and Foundation Neuroscience), and retired as a teacher and social worker, … More Why do I blog?
Being ‘unvisitable’! When your world becomes an ‘exclusion zone’. Vlodomir woke today like yesterday And felt no danger in the air, Just like Everyday, he showered in water That would as usual play his body Like an instrument emitting happy Sounds of satisfaction in the same way He was not sure would happen ever more. … More Being ‘unvisitable’! When your world becomes an ‘exclusion zone’.
Domestication or anthropomorphism: do people ‘make the worst pets’? Some thoughts derived from Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’. Do you know the poem I refer to in my title? It is by Thomas Gray (he of the infamous Elegy in a Country Churchyard), … More Domestication or anthropomorphism: do people ‘make the worst pets’? Some thoughts derived from Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’.
If a work of art in words is worth reading, you will have never finally or completely read it – you will always be reading it. Deciding to continue reading ‘All My Sons’ by Arthur Miller in preparation for seeing Ivo Van Hove’s version of it live-streamed on 16th April 2026. The reason I am … More If a work of art in words is worth reading, you will have never finally or completely read it – you will always be reading it. Deciding to continue reading ‘All My Sons’ by Arthur Miller in preparation for seeing Ivo Van Hove’s version of it live-streamed on 16th April 2026.
… but that was in another country; / And besides the wench is dead.’ Let’s make our diversity our common unity and not ‘other’ those of ‘another country’, if that was ever possible. An answer based on a case study reading of the novel by James Baldwin, Another Country. This will turn into an answer … More ‘… but that was in another country; / And besides the wench is dead.’ Let’s make our diversity our common unity and not ‘other’ those of ‘another country’, if that was ever possible. An answer based on a case study reading of the novel by James Baldwin, ‘Another Country’.
Being a ‘character from a book’ may be not be enough, unless you can also re-write your own story. A case study of the brilliant TV series,’The Other Bennet Sister’. There are clear reasons for wanting to be, if anyone in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary Bennet, but perhaps very ‘other’ than Austen wrote her, … More Being a ‘character from a book’ may be not be enough, unless you can also re-write your own story. A case study of the brilliant TV series,’The Other Bennet Sister’.
The two terms in my title are near enough in appearance. However Wikipedia defines and discusses them separately. Social distancing is the name given to a public health measure, called for by government or other authority to prevent the spread of air-borne communicable diseases, practiced widely during the Covid-19 pandemic. Social distance is a descriptive … More The institutionalisation of social-distancing! Does it make a difference to the kind, quality or measurement of social distance?
How do we travel the distance between us? Seeing the film Midwinter Break at the new Reel cinema, Bishop Auckland at 1 p.m. on Monday 30th March 2026. Let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge that the key flashback in Midwinter Break is to a moment in which the Northern Irish troubles hit the lives … More How do we travel the distance between us? Seeing the film ‘Midwinter Break’.
With thanks to this webpage (see its Summary in Appendix below) from Phrase Dictionary You took me on a roller-coaster ride,Unlocked a treasure-chest, you bravely triedTo tell me ’twas a journey deep insideMy heart: it opens, you said, the doors wideTo go behind the mirror where you hide.You puzzle me to think again. I criedIn … More I can’t choose one. Words fail me to describe them.
Wikipedia is a good beginning for this prompt question, which specifically asks for a description of ‘my’ morning rituals’. Ritual is, in my selective understanding at least, primarily a social phenomenon that enacts a prescribed means, sometimes to the minutest detail, of expressing the invisible and numinous in a process. It manifests the ways in … More From rituals to being an effective person in following Rodin’s advice to Rilke: ‘You Must Change Your Life!’?
Whilst we like to think children have no conception of death, the evidence seems to be that from the age of 5 upwards, children begin to develop an idea of death as and end, of worldly life at least, though their views of this still contain elements of magical thinking as to cause of death … More At five, I still wanted to know that I would grow up, period. And not come to a full stop.
Most Britons do not understand the terrible responsibility of the UK for the setting up of Israel as an Apartheid state: Do films help us? A case study of the beautiful film ‘Palestine 36‘, a dramatisation of the period of the Peel Commission Report published in 1937, by Annemarie Jacir. The British mandate for Palestine, a … More Most Britains do not understand the terrible responsibility of the UK for the setting up of Israel as an Apartheid state: Do films help us? A case study of the beautiful film ‘Palestine 36’, a dramatisation of the period of the Peel Commission Report published in 1937, by Annemarie Jacir.
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