Describe a family member. My husband does not want to appear in my blog and my parents died a dozen years ago. Their siblings live a long way away from us and aren’t that interested in keeping in touch. Thus I have to fall back on Daisy, for I will restrict my working definition of … More Can our dog be treated as a family member?
Forgive the doggerel. Much love goes with the wishful preaching! Steve
What alternative career paths have you considered or are interested in? This is possibly a non-question for me since, being retired, I have no thoughts of a career in anything. My past is littered with the search and pursuit of alternatives but I doubt I would want to pursue them now or their alternatives, even … More How to answer, being retired!
What food would you say is your specialty? The interesting thing about today’s question is I suppose what is meant by specialty. The word has a kind of professional air to it, so that a working chef would talk of a specialism that they could say they were expert in. It might be a food … More The art of eating.
Today it was reported widely that the Israeli government has called for the resignation of the Secretary General of the United Nations (UN) for saying that, though the attacks on Israeli land and people killing an estimated 1400 were ‘appalling’ (as of course they were and more) they were not an event that happened in … More The ‘major’ events in history will turn out to be the ones we only half-understood at the time and were little publicised.
Words are terribly significant and phrases are perhaps more so. Context is probably all important in interpreting them however. To be asked what I am ‘working at’ feels a case in point. How, for instance, does the phrase contrast with a phrase using a different preposition, as in this question, such as: ‘What are you … More The end of failure and the beginning of ‘working at’ or ‘working towards’. Just what are you ‘playing at’.
I wonder what ‘most people’ means in the question today? For most people in the world neither know me or care to know me in any way at all and that is not necessarily because they make a point of excluding me or because there is nothing to know about me – although both of … More ‘There, that is our secret: go to sleep!’
When Tennyson imagined ‘lazy days’ he turned to a myth of a kind of rest that felt like giving up on what till now has seemed your allotted mission in life. He chose, as often, to retell a story about Ulysses from Homer’s The Odyssey to imagine both a man with a mission – for … More Rest is a dream yet to happen, even though ‘… others in Elysian valleys dwell, / Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel’.
I am no great fan of ‘success’. Hence the Gore Vidal quotation. But whilst we are on Gore Vidal’s sayings we might strike a note of caution. The better known quotation of his (which may well turn out – as much he mouthed or wrote did – to be someone else’s saying) seems to suggest … More ‘It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail’.
Forgive the ponderousness of what follows. I am in that mood again! In that aspect of my character I sometimes talk like a preacher of holy text, though I am neither a Christian nor what one might call ‘religious’. However, it is to Biblical text I turn when faced with defining what is a GOOD … More A good neighbour is not someone you know but someone who stays close to you when others don’t.
What could you try for the first time? I have felt defeated by this topic for discussion and I turned to references to the ‘first time’ on the web. In large, and on an inspection of them that probably lacked rigour, the pages thrown up by both Google and Bing search engines seemed to fall … More The last of the ‘the first time’ I tried it syndrome.
What principles define how you live? Life needn’t end. That gnomic sentence does not mean I think I or anyone else will not die ( nor that an endless personal life is a desirable idea). Nor does it mean that I believe, and urge belief in others, in a personal afterlife. Personally I find the … More Let it be continuous …
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