Below is a starter on our nostalgia trip. This is a brilliant photo-collage showing triggers to possible nostalgia and I suppose it is things like these pictures or the objects in them that this question looks for us to name – and what is amazing is that they all, as photographs at least, sort of … More Wake me up when it’s yesterday. Nostalgia revisited because tomorrow should not WAIT.

In lieu of a blog more doggerel. Why am I so obsessed by internal rhyming these days. LOL! Love Steven xxxx Building libraries in the air! Whilst others in their aerial castlesDwell, built for a little dream of powerOver us, in sodden huts their vassals,I care for a bud, to watch it flowerAnd shed its … More Building libraries in the air!

What we create from all creation comes, No something from some nothing comes at all And brightest lights still travelling from suns Long after their death, engendered fall. Though we do not see that act of making It depends upon those many at work To make it; source material faking Its absence and worker’s struggle … More “Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again”. (‘King Lear’ Act 1, Scene 1, line 99).

I was born 24th October 1954 in Halifax General Hospital at Salterhebble, Halifax. As I chose this question, you would think I had thought deeply about the year of my birth, but that isn’t in fact the case. Finding significance in such things anyway seems to me a kind of extension of pattern-finding and such … More Is my birth year (1954) significant?

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. .