A ‘judge of character’ is a tautology. Sometimes we go to great lengths to harmonise the various supposed signals of the notion of character, as we adjudge it, to persons, assuming for sake of control of a world that can seem to be unreadable, I think, that we can even assume a correspondence in inner and outer … More To ‘judge character’ is easy. The difficult thing is to appreciate a person.

Fun is a word I use rarely. I sometimes, I hesitate to add, wince when other people use it. Play is a different thing because play always leans into a task and makes it something that human beings feel to be ‘real’, a space, set of circumstances and other characters in which they feel an … More If fun were an exam subject I would have failed! Lol.

There are so many things that the figure of Jesus Christ in the New Testament says that even a non-believer like myself has to applaud. However, just as I do not accept that there is ONE God that is the repository of all truth whether I or anyone else understands it, I also cannot accept … More I admire those that are ‘careful and troubled about many things’ and do what they can as they can and try to be their best in many things.

Making an ass of myself: Playing Bottom (in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ of course. When I taught English Literature at the Roehampton Institute I played Bottom in a perambulating production in the grounds of the then Froebel College, a constituent part of the Institute. It started off in a grove in the gardens and ended in … More Making an ass of myself: Playing Bottom (in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ of course)

Definitions aren’t always necessary but here I think they are, for the idea of the ‘wild’ has always has problematic associations because it only has meaning in contrast with its antonyms (words with an opposite meaning) and hence is easily absorbed into binary thinking. That is more obvious in contexts set by specialist synonyms of … More Ask yourself, not only ‘why’ do I want to see contained wild animals but ‘what’ needs in me does that covering need suggest.

That was a place. If I was a good-enough writer or painter I could recreate it in ways in which its ‘placeness’ found itself in a much larger context. But I am not an artist. <sigh>. (My title is an edited quotation from my text below, in want of other inventive power.) At first blush … More That was a place. If I was a good-enough writer or painter I could recreate it in ways in which its ‘placeness’ found itself in a much larger context. But I am not an artist. .

There could never be only one thing that I might wish to change in the conduct of my life but, to tell the truth, I think the notion anyway of doing it by changing something you think of as a unified, integrated and whole ‘self’ is, in part at least, more of a fiction than … More To mitigate the fact of being ‘born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves’.