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.
What does ‘positive impact’ mean? A story from another life not mine. Daniel wound his arms around himself and squeezed. Usually this kind of pressure seemed a kind of unctuous thing that created a flow of flesh and fat quivering through his body, as if the flesh around him were coiled like a snake, ready … More What does ‘positive impact’ mean? A story from another life not mine.
‘“What do you remember? Can you tell me?” / But it was clear from the disappointed fall of Pyara’s face, the slow release of his shoulder, that the past had given him the slip, that whichever thread his father had been clutching at had escaped, the memory unspooling into the night’.[1] This is a blog … More ‘“What do you remember? Can you tell me?” This is a blog on Sunjeev Sahota (2024) ‘The Spoiled Heart’.
As Israeli forces mount their early scoping attacks on Rafah that will lead to the death of vast numbers of displaced Gazans, asked to move there by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who can teach Donald Trump how to defend himself against a proven case for corruption and abuses of power … More The legitimisation of state and military power as tools of genocide by Benjamin Netanyahu.
When do you feel most productive? “…,the job of remembering is to reassemble, to literally re-member, put the relevant members back together, But, what I am getting at is the re-membering is essentially not only an act of retrieval, but a creative thing, it’s an act, an act . . . of the imagination”.[1] Reading … More I feel most ‘productive’ when I think about engaging with art that matters, and will survive me. A blog on preparing to see ‘mnemonic’ at The National Theatre in July.
Nicholas Thomas performs on the stage, at Hexham Queen’s Hall Book Festival, the brilliant balancing act on Gauguin’s life and art written in his book. This blog is an update and follow-up of a preparation blog on Nicholas Thomas’ book available at this link. Its title: ‘This is a blog on Nicholas Thomas (2024) ‘Gauguin … More Nicholas Thomas performs on the stage, at Hexham Queen’s Hall Book Festival, the brilliant balancing act on Gauguin’s life and art written in his book.
Turn where you will for advice with regard to how to conduct yourself (whether in a formal job interview or life generally), you will, in the end, get advised that you need to ‘Be Yourself!’, or so some formula that boils down to the same thing. But ‘being yourself’ implies that you have one unitary … More About one thing the existentialists were surely right: freedom is angst / anxiety and that is why we require to be engaged / committed / bound to our own project.
Nicholas Thomas’s critical-and-autobiographical reading of Gauguin’s time in Polynesia, and the determinations in the man that led up to it, explores the contradictions in the intersubjective and intrasubjective confrontation of cultures. This is a blog on Nicholas Thomas (2024) Gauguin and Polynesia London, Head Of Zeus Ltd, in preparation of seeing him at Hexham Book … More This is a blog on Nicholas Thomas (2024) ‘Gauguin and Polynesia’, in preparation of seeing him at Hexham Book Festival, Queens Hall on Sunday 5th May 2024, 11 a.m. Brilliant on anthropology of transsexuality.
What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite? I think I may have said all the necessary prologue to this one in an earlier blog. You can find it here: A celebrant of the holy days of retirement. Some thoughts about the fate of ritual in a world defined by scheduled work. In brief, … More Some questions you feel you may have already answered many times! Lol.
Blurring out the voter in the interest of stasis and parties who want only it. Today there are we are told local elections. I cannot remember when I was last asked to vote for local Councillors and today in Durham the only people up for election are for Mayoral candidates for the North East region … More Voting might matter if the system of ‘first past the post’ did not favour a retrograde two-party system.
Speaking the Unspeakable: Alphonse Daudet ‘In the Land of Pain’ In the Land of Pain’ was Barnes’ own chosen title for this book and is his translation of a phrase Daudet invents in the book to describe a sanatorium for the dying. Let’s face it: Julian Barnes’s edition of his own translation of La Doulou (La Douleur) – the … More Speaking the Unspeakable: Alphonse Daudet ‘In the Land of Pain’
If you like watching how bisexual threesomes might occur that goes no further than the operations of eyes and thoughts, Luca Guadagnino ‘s Challengers will seem to you to be a film worth giving up over 2 hours of your life to. A film without love and remarkably little insight into the sexuality of a threesome, … More A note on Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Challengers’ seen yesterday.
Thomas Hiram Holding, supposed to be the great populariser of the activity of camping, outside his camping tent. Whether it has sufficient academic credence (by which is meant referencing to authoritative evidence) or not, the Wikipedia entry on CAMPING fits with my thoughts, memories and, possibly, biases, in understanding what camping as a term means in … More Why is ‘camping’ just not classy? Or is it? Not for my class upbringing!
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