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.
How do you relax? Frankie Goes to Hollywood ‘Relax’ 12″ Disc by Personal camera, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7794234 I was at least 29 when I first laughed out loud at the word ‘Relax’, because it was 1983, I was just starting a job at a University of London affiliated institute and being gay was still a … More The ambiguous release of tension
If you had to give up one word that you use regularly, what would it be? One may not be such an authority on how even just you use even one word of which you think you are master. Hear out this debate, one that ought to matter a lot in the discussion of languages … More When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. So why bother losing ‘one word’ when it might be any word..
Are you holding a grudge? About? Loving an alcohol dependent person is a messy business particularly when you need to believe in the person who is thus dependent. Even now it feels terrible to point out those terrors because alcohol dependency too often makes the person misrepresent their reasons for starting and maintaining their dependency. … More The lies of an alcohol dependent person are understandable. The willingness of others to be co-dependent for their own interests in the name of ‘friendship’ is too. But is it unforgivable too?
Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home. I am obsessed with Freud’s idea of the Heimlich I think. Being at home is a feeling of safety and security that doesn’t always correlate with a physical place and time in space. We can travel many miles and for many hours and carry … More If home is a construct made up of habitual behaviours, ideas , emotions and senses, so are the distances we travel from it.
‘Now and forever more he was a marked man’.[1] ‘At one time I thought I was going against my natural inclinations, that I was in fact homosexual: but this sordid device so horrified me that I thought I would go mad’.[2] A sequel to a blog on the Irish novelist, John Broderick, having read various … More ‘Now and forever more he was a marked man’. ‘At one time I thought I was going against my natural inclinations, that I was in fact homosexual’. A sequel to a blog on the Irish novelist, John Broderick, having read various short journalism and his biography: Madeleine Kingston (2004) ‘Something in the Head: The Life and Work of John Broderick’.
What does your ideal home look like? The appearance of order and the reflection of what we would like to think of as our ideal image is relatively new historically and relates to the aesthetic of interior design. Nevertheless, it is there in van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage picture as much as any edition of Ideal … More The uncanny is the ideal as it looks to you behind the mirror of appearances!
BOOKER 2023: The narrator of the most of Martin MacInnes’ novel In Ascension, Leigh-Ann Hasenboch (but mostly Leigh), is a marine biologist and researcher, with incredible powers of learning and self-application, who incidentally is also lesbian. Her life becomes haunted by a quest for learning. In her first venture towards seeking these aims, she affirms, … More BOOKER 2023: This is a blog on Martin MacInnes (2023) ‘In Ascension’.
What brings a tear of joy to your eye? A tear will show the feeling I hold back, Small signal of something I can’t disguise Or hide. Those feelings that can only crack The surface of reserve will not surprise With joy another that your love would hold In open arms. A smile’s more true … More Why shyly cry, you can openly smile
Why do you blog? If I stuck with Descartes in the foundational belief that ‘I think therefore I am’, life might be easier because, after all, there is a remarkably low threshold for evidence of having thought or even for continuing to ‘think’ in a continuum of supposed inner activity. But thought as a label … More I blog therefore I am!
BOOKER 2023: Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song may be a book that fuels opposing views of its quality. Melissa Harrison in The Guardian says it is: “powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real. From its opening pages it exerts a grim kind of grip; even when approached cautiously and read in short bursts it somehow lingers, its world … More BOOKER 2023: Paul Lynch’s ‘Prophet Song’: A book of humanity set against injustice (and other deeper things).
Interview someone — a friend, another blogger, your mother, the mailman — and write a post based on their responses. We like to think ballet, like other arts, should be an expression of the joy of learning that art and be accessible at all levels of involvement. If we are to have impressive ballet dancers … More How do you integrate the aim of child education in an elite art like ballet with public production
How are you feeling right now? My real problem with this prompt is how to hone in on what the questioner might mean by the phrase ‘right now’. That’s because I cannot determine enough that’s static or detachable enough from the motion of time in all of its manifestations to fix upon a ‘now’ on … More Right now?
Steve_Bamlett_blog 