So we’re faced with a second general election in two years, the bread wrapped around last year’s Brexit referendum making perhaps the least appetising sandwich in memory. And it looks like being the strangest general election in memory, too. This is a general election that nobody – beyond Liberal Democrats, 24 hour news channels and […]
Tracey died on Thursday.
There. I said it. But it makes no more sense written down than it does being repeated a hundred times in my head.
Tracey was a school friend. We were in the same class and we were young together. She was tall and smart and funny and pretty. For a long time we were together almost every day; two people in a large and incredible group of friends who laughed and played and shared endless happy hours in the sun and the rain, never quite feeling the cold. A group of friends who took each other for granted in the best possible way, because there were no horizons.
“So I’m thinking that bliss is ever present inside all of us. It is neither caused by a sunset or by a song or by a god. The sunset and the song and the god merely reveal the bliss that was there all along. Nothing external produces bliss inside…nothing. They only reveal, temporarily, what is […]
“When afflicted with a feeling of pain those who lack inner awareness sorrow, grieve and lament, beating their breasts and becoming distraught. So they feel two pains, physical and mental. It is just like being shot with an arrow, and right afterwards being shot with a second one, so that they feel two arrows.” Siddhārtha […]
Establishing a new blog can be a very strange thing. Obviously I’m tickled by the fact you’re reading what I’m writing, and in particularly giddy moments I imagine two, three or more readers, nodding and shaking in all the right places.
So, dear reader, as you have been kind enough to drop by, I feel I should at least go to the trouble of introducing myself with ten things that you (probably) don’t know about me. I’ll begin almost an entire century ago…
There was a young man of Japan, Whose limericks never would scan. When they asked him, Why? He said, with a sigh, “It’s because I always try to get as many words into the last line as I possibly can.”
“No matter what kind of problem you are dealing with, one needs to make an effort to change things – the problem will not fix itself. A person needs to have a strong determination to change the problem. This determination comes from your conviction that the problem is serious, and it has serious consequences. And […]
Fascination is defined as “the state of being intensely interested (as by awe or terror)”. It’s safe to say that I am fascinated by death. I hate it. I fear it. Yet I think about it. A lot. And I hate that, too. That I am writing this article at all is significant, and entirely at […]
“I kept [your dreams] with me babe. I put them with my own. Can’t make it on my own. I built my dreams around you.” The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl To my wife.