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 would you do if you lost all your possessions? All I possess is mine to give and I give it to you. All I possess is mine to give and I give it. All I possess is mine to give and I give. All I possess is mine to give. All I possess is … More Losing the words as a reflection on possession and loss.
‘It was this detachment, even more than his facelessness and the white coiling hand, that made Mrs Whitaker linger … / Suddenly Mrs Whitaker caught her breath. The white hand, so strangely contrasted with such coarse clothes, stopped twisting the button and reached out towards her. But the man was not beckoning. He was holding … More ‘It was this detachment, even more than his facelessness and the white coiling hand, that made Mrs Whitaker linger …’. Can it be that a novel and an artist can get forgotten even though they write at least one novel that is, in the words of David Norris, ‘in particular a masterpiece’.
What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind? The idea of changeless certainty about topics or issues is not an attractive one to me. Of course there need to be values that guide and limit the range of change in feelings, attitudes or thoughts about topics and give your own thinking some … More Things change!: that’s the blog.
Tell us about a time when you felt out of place. The rich man in his castle,The poor man at his gate,God made them, high or lowly,And ordered their estate. The third verse of the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful is rarely sung now unsurprisingly and perhaps we did not sing it thus during … More Make the whole of space and time that is available into your place: it’s okay to feel anxious as you replace yourself, of course.
As I get older, 69 on the 24th of this month of October 2023, I wondered what my life would be like if it weren’t called on ‘to go on pilgrimage’, somewhat as Chaucer’s pilgrims were, by the plastic and other arts (a range of them), and wide learning interests that sometimes feel so boundless … More Habitué of the Snug. Call that a social life!?
Your life without a computer: what does it look like? The prompt today contains, of course, its own bias. First, it speaks to people who are first asked to imagine life without a computer as if that absence could occur to one individual, regardless of the rest of the globe. Second, it sort of presumes … More Life before the spread of personal computer technology was once a fact but can it even be imagined now.
What skill would you like to learn? If you search the internet for the term ‘passive skills’, the likelihood is that the majority of returned sites will be on the use of the concept in computer gaming (they were on Bing anyway). These skills have a dark side: in their purest form we compare them, … More If all skills were active skills, learning would stop. Indeed, perhaps the fact is some active skills need unlearning. Relearning passive skills.
What details of your life could you pay more attention to? I think the idea of paying attention to your life down to each detail is problematic. Were it possible to attend consciously to each detail of my life, I would still not be in control of these details since so often they are details … More Attend not to the intention but to the accident of your presence having an effect.
‘We raised him and we saved him and when he was old enough he accused us of keeping him from becoming his … true self’.[1] This blog is a preparation to see Lemn Sissay’s Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an adaptation, retelling (and more) in a new dramatisation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis with the company Frantic Assembly with more … More ‘We raised him and we saved him and when he was old enough he accused us of keeping him from becoming his … true self’. This blog is a preparation to see Lemn Sissay’s ‘Kafka’s Metamorphosis’, an adaptation of Kafka with more than a glance at Sissay’s memoir ‘My Name Is Why’, for that book underlies the drama too. I shall be seeing it at York Theatre Royal on Thursday October 12th at 2.00 p.m.
What’s your #1 priority tomorrow? Tomorrow, as it happens, is the second session of a seven week counselling session I have started to try and reconfigure a life gone awry and an emotional economy in crisis. Sometimes, you start these things with a sense of how an episode like this in your life has been … More Facing 😈demons and slaying 🐉 dragons: the power of being counselled.
In what ways does hard work make you feel fulfilled? Alasdair Gray quoted Canadian poet Dennis Leigh when he used the phrase in my title. On the outer wall of the Holyrood building of the Scottish parliament it appears as a monumental word art work and its authorship is attributed to him alone. He spent … More “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation”: does hard work fulfill only when it were ‘as if’ it could make anew a world in which work has become to seem futile and counter-productive.
I felt unwell at my course in York today so walked off back to my hotel to rest. On the walk back I felt I ought to stop again and thus took a seat in the art gallery and determined because if that to see the Bloom exhibition on Flowers in Art before I left. … More What’s an old man to do?
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