For the second time in two days, Geoff, my husband, Daisy, our dog, and I set off for a visit to the Borders Book Festival held at the lovely Town of Melrose. Why the second time. Therein lies the tale and why I am still looking forward to Scotland not waking up in the Borders. … More Scotland, for the second time in two days. Lol.

“What are you doing here’?” are the words spoken in the short film in Spanish above as a boy engineers to be where he knows his crush will walk. With impassive faces, the first sign for the boy leaning against a fence that he is daring to confront his ‘crush’ is in the looking away, … More Crushing – a teenage boy’s first love. His name was Tony.

Do we have the capacity, as we live through climatological change to pick out a ‘season’ and characterise its preferential advantages? Scientists have to ensure, when they talk about a thing, that in order to measure how it changes exposed to possible change agents, it is precisely the same ‘thing’ measured each time. Hence Liz … More Should the question be: “What ‘was’ your favourite season?”

Abraham Maslow, the humanist psychologist created a ‘hierarchy of needs’ (it is pictured below using the simply psychology websites’ icon – because it is so simple). According to it (but of course I oversimplify) needs at a higher level of the hierarchy cannot be met before those at the lower levels, and these needs are, … More If self-realisation through reading is a luxury designed for an élite, yet I still can’t live without it, isn’t it a necessity? Why I buy and read about the obscure and unurgent things in life. I read Charles Freeman’s (2023) ‘The Children of Athena’.

Most bloggers create a tagline, although they attach it as a tagline name or statement of intent only the blogsite. Mine was ‘Lifelong Learning’. I intended, I thought to indicate a response to retirement, to a belief that divorced the idea of learning from institutional education and from work. But terms deteriorate. Lifelong learning became … More Autonomic Learning For Life

A claim of being ‘passionate’ about something often comes with an apology these days. Passionate people don’t just talk to you. The ‘go off on one’ in the modern term. They seem forced to act or talk in ways that go beyond people’s expectations of them, or indeed anyone. Those people often include the person … More Passionate or not? Feeling forced to feel it or forced not to feel at all.

The answer to this prompt question (‘What are the most important things needed to live a good life?) has to be one based on how and who we love and value outside the circle of what we call me. But you cannot achieve such things easily and they are often obscured and misrepresented. We have … More Dirg Aab-Richards, a Black gay elder from Brixton, would say the important things are an integration of ‘love’ and ‘communities of diversity’. Yet he felt he had to reinvent them, rewritten from the ‘works of a white man’ in order to find ‘What wasn’t there but was’. This is a blog on Jason Okundaye’s 2024 book, ‘Revolutionary Acts’.

In Act 4 Scene 2 of Cymbeline, a late play of Shakespeare’s, is one of his most famous songs, possibly made so by Virginia Woolf’s obsession with it. It is, though, rarely reprinted as the dramatic lyric or part song, distributed between two roles that it is (Cymbeline, Act , Scene 2, lines 331 – … More The wisdom of the late Shakespeare plays tells us that to ‘fear no more’ is to be dead.

Olivia Laing tells us as her book The Garden Against Time closes that she loves a line  from the fourteenth-century Psalter by Richard Rolle: This boke is cald garden closed, wel enseled, paradyse full of appils’. In contrast she goes on to say that her ‘book is a garden opened and spilling over. The common … More Olivia Laing thinks the answer to this question is to ‘cultivate your garden’. But she shows us what a political act that is!

A ‘rolling description’ is where I post early on the day of an event and keep updating it as the experience I am trying to recount occurs. It is now 6.30 a.m on the 28th May and I am looking forward to friends Rob and Linda Goffee arriving(about 11 a.m. we think, to leave for … More It is joyful to visit mutual interests with friends. A rolling description of visiting The Laing Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to see ‘Turner: Art, Industry & Nostalgia’, on Tuesday, 28 May 2024.