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?
What’s the trait you value most about yourself? Trait theory derived from the work of the psychologist, Gordon Allport. It contends that human personality is characterised by traits that resemble states of being, feeling and thinking but which are stable and enduring.They emphasise a view of psychological development that is heavily influenced by innate oor … More I like to think I value the fact that critical thinking is an early response when I approach questions asked of me. But is critical thinking a trait? And why is it so unpopular? This blog is on whether trait theory helps in self-understanding.
Naomi, the only role in this play despite its huge local cast literally powering the production on bikes which really or in fiction, and no doubt only partially, by generating energy from bikes on the stage, has been left to tell the story of the great Extinctions that have occurred through geological time. We are … More And for the living … I wish you a good death. A beautiful production at York Theatre Royal.
During my working life which started in the late 1970s, work changed its nature, the largest symptom of which was the growth of public service managerialism. In the name of efficiency and resource economics, work changed to match business models. It followed that objectives like increased well-being and secure attachment in relationship-based work were turned … More Work from which you learned, grew as a person and gained personal fulfillment used once to exist. Here are 3 examples from my past career.
Looking for Bliss in Masculine Objects: A blog on an Exhibition at Bishop Auckland Town Hall named Quest for the Perfect Shirt by the Newcastle artist Richard Bliss. The catalogue and the artist, Richard Bliss. A wonderful man to chat with: but what will he do with what you say? Me and my husband, Geoff, … More Looking for Bliss in Masculine Objects: A blog on an Exhibition at Bishop Auckland Town Hall named ‘Quest for the Perfect Shirt’ by Richard Bliss.
