Born in 1954. Chequered career including Lecturer in English, Social Worker and Lecturer in Social Work. Had breaks related to mental health that also meant I worked in social care. Now retired.
Charles Dyer’s play, later a film, The Rattle f a Simple Man tells the story of a Northern mill worker who goes to London to find out if he is up to the job of bringing charismatic success into his life. It is success as a lover he seeks and hence that is a big … More The Rattle Of A Simple Man: or resetting a jelly that has already liquefied.
Act 1 Scene 5 is pivotal in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet for the eponymous character and the progress of the play’s plot itself, partly because it makes clear that the character of Hamlet is the substance of the plot of Hamlet as a play. If plot distributes the actions that take place in a play, those … More ‘born to set it right!’. Genetics, Destiny and Duty for all time in ‘Hamlet’
They were dancing to the music of timein those days, gliding through the moleskin hours,or so it seemed to us. Our vocal chordsbroken now, each song we sing lacks the air that my love struggles to take. Raking backthe sound that coughs all night: the rasping hackthat like Lear’s hand smells of mortality.The air that … More ‘It was like everything you thought you knew could be rewritten. / like learning that time can sing and that it’s old and young, …’. (Brice in Ali Smith’s ‘Gliff’) What song might time sing?
The Indeed website is an online job search and career placement service, describing itself as the ‘#1’ of its kind. About this I can’t comment on, although their own description is below (part of it at least): Detail of: https://www.indeed.com/about However, I noticed that it raises the issue of the first day at a new … More Expectations, illusions and realities. The issue of the ‘first day’ at something.
The phrase ‘ a healthy mind in a healthy body’ from Juvenal Satires X haunts the insistence on doing physical exercise or elae of advisers, counsellors and other ‘Job’s comforters ‘ (Job 2: 11). Read on from Job verse 2 if you want the content of their advice and Job’s summary of it in his … More ‘et potiores / Herculis aerumnas credat saevosque labores / et venere et cenis et pluma Sardanapalli’. Minding Physical exercise.
Mies Van Der Rohe thought the phrase ‘less is more’ a defence of the refusal of embellishments in architecture that are both non-functional and decorative rather than part of a basic form or formal concept expressed by a building, but the phrase is a kind of pleasing nonsense that the love of binaries makes possible. … More The total absurdity of the phrase ‘less is more’! An example of ‘overthinking’ on that theme.
Leonardo da Vinci (about 1499-1500) The Burlington House Cartoon.Charcoal (and wash?) heightened with white chalk on paper, mounted on canvas, 141.5 x 104.6 cm. Purchased with a special grant and contributions from the Art Fund, The Pilgrim Trust, and through a public appeal organised by the Art Fund, 1962. NG6337. Available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/NG6337 There were … More We called it the Leonardo cartoon. We visited it every week.
Do you or your family make any special dishes for the holidays? Language courses for non-English speakers often go wild in their attempts to give specific meanings to the different words used to describe the things we cook or ‘make’ and eat. But they ignore the words of a famous debate on the relationship between … More The names we give to what we eat!
A quotation from Balzac is worthless as a proposition of a supposed truth as held and stated by that great soul, for these quotations are often, as this is, the stated view of a character in a novel, a thing up for debate. It is a good proposition to start with in response to this … More The silliest binary of them all is that between positive and negative life events.
Tomorrow, the 29th November 2024, the House of Commons debate the Assisted Dying Bill. Already the media is full of hand-wringing MPs commenting on the ‘difficulty’ of the decision. We are meant to empathise but in doing so, we have to remember that the Bill is an attempt to increase the degree of autonomous decision-making … More The hardest decision is yet to come.
Good is such a loaded word. But to be ‘good at’ is not considered as loaded. Its synonyms are pretty obvious, as these, from one online dictionary: Synonyms and examples: skilful (UK) She’s a skilful driver; skilled He’s a skilled mechanic;, able She’s a very able student; gifted She’s a gifted musician; talented He’s a … More Good at it! Or good enough together!
‘Stop saying words, my sister whispered back. I want to hear the story’.[1] The paradox may be that we express our identity in words and names not in the process of telling and hearing our stories. I think Ali Smith thinks that may be true of the configuration of sex/gender too. This is a blog … More ‘Stop saying words, my sister whispered back. I want to hear the story’. This is a blog on Ali Smith (2024) ‘Gliff ‘.
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