No-one heads for the hills thinking it's going to end badly. But sometimes, it just does. We hadn't been to the English Lake District since 2018, a long interruption in a sequence of visits going back almost 40 years. The pandemic, family issues - there were lots of reasons for the gap. But to say [...]
It is, of course, the season to be jolly, but also when we all look back over the year just gone, and think ahead to what might just be. The media are awash with such reflections and speculations, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I add some random thoughts of my own. The backdrop [...]
21 June is World Humanist Day. So I thought it worth posting a few thoughts about what it means, for me, to be a humanist. First, a bit of definition. A humanist is someone who believes that the Universe is natural, not supernatural, and looks to reason and science to explain it; that it's a [...]
So that's it. Another season finished. Agonisingly, we didn't make it into the play-offs, purely on the basis of goal difference. No-one can complain at the effort the team put in, but you can’t help thinking about what might have been. The football supporter's life is full of such moments. We start each season full [...]
Sometimes the modern world can feel pretty overwhelming. Perhaps it was ever so, but the intermingling of social media, streaming, 24 hour news media, commercialism and consumerism have pushed the volume up to sometimes ear-splitting levels and the colour palette to seldom less than garish. Where to find sense and meaning - and peace - [...]
A central principle of a working life - or, at least, of my working life - is that anything non-urgent can be put off until retirement. The folders full of paperwork, the stacked boxes of VHS and cassette tapes, the mid-1980s cheque book stubs, the vast collection of keys long dissociated from the locks in [...]
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