Category: An Ordinary Bloke
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Call me a novelist
(This is a personal note to myself – please ignore.) I’m a writer. There’s no doubt about that, as you would see if you bothered to explore my website. It’s mostly about writing and most of it has been written – by me of course. Problem is ‘writer’ is too wide a term to be […]
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A random bit of live writing (Feb 2016)
How do you choose which bits of your life to focus on when you write or attempt to write some kind of autobiography like this? What are the criteria? Hmm. I suppose it depends on who you are writing to – yes – because when you write, or at least when I write, I have […]
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This is it
This, of course, is to no one. This is just me babbling in the dark, somewhere in the depths of the universe. This is no where. I am no one. But – things go on, around me, inside me, in other places I can’t imagine right now but may become known, in a small way, […]
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An Ordinary Bloke writes about knowing everything
So now you’ve got to the point where you’ve had enough, done enough, know enough. You don’t need to learn any more about any thing. Well, maybe that’s pushing it a bit, that’s a bit too arrogant. You still learn at least one small lesson every day, you will always learn. But all the rest […]
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An Ordinary Bloke writes about Ordinary Things
Everything is ordinary, birth, life, death, flying, swimming, running, climbing. That’s what this world is. You can take any one of those ordinary things and zoom in and you’ll find that the closer you get the more it fragments, the more complex it gets. Zoom in some more and you get lost in the endless […]
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An Ordinary Bloke writes about the End of The Sixties
The Sixties are finally ending. The signs are everywhere. The characters that populate the sixties of our shared imagination are shuffling off their mortal coils faster than newly elected politicians shrugging off their promises. It won’t be long before finding a genuine sixties survivor will be almost as impossible as getting an honest Tory to […]
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An Ordinary Bloke writes about (not) being vegan
I’m just an ordinary bloke and I used to be a vegan. Is that a contradiction? Can you be a vegan and be ordinary? Can an ordinary bloke even be a vegan? What’s ordinary about being vegan? Well, it used to be impossible to be thought of as being ordinary and a vegan at the […]
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An Ordinary Bloke writes about Vegans keeping Cats.
As a vegan of over twenty years and a vegetarian of more than twenty years before that, one of the questions that has always perplexed me is why do vegans like to share their lives with and look after cats, particularly rescue cats. Cats are obligate carnivores – they must eat meat, their physiology is […]
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An Ordinary Bloke writes about Being Stupid
I’m not stupid. At least that’s what my family, friends, and teachers have always told me. And there is evidence to support this view. For example, I once sat the Mensa IQ test. I think it’s agreed that intelligence is the opposite of stupidity, and I soared to the top of the class in that […]
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An Ordinary Bloke writes about Aliens, Drugs and the Nature of Reality
Here’s an audio recording of this piece – text below: Yesterday, after a breakfast of tea and toast with tahini and yeast extract we went to the Farmers’ Market to buy organic vegetables. We’ve been going to the market for years and once ran a stall there selling our own handmade soap and body products, […]
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An ordinary bloke writes about the Gents
Due to my cisgender conditioning the inside of women’s public toilets are not familiar to me, but as someone who seems to urinate twice as much as I drink I am a frequent visitor to the Gents. Maybe I’m anti-social but I’ve got to the point where I prefer to use a cubicle even if […]
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An ordinary bloke writes about Dog Shit
Before we start let me say that I love dogs – well, maybe love is too strong a term, let’s just say I respect them in the same way I respect all other living things – who all have the same right to make use of the facilities our shared planet offers. Obviously you’re not […]
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An ordinary bloke writes about being culled
Have you ever been ‘culled’? Yes, removed from the herd because you are surplus to requirements; more than that – you are persona non grata. I’m talking about social media in general and Facebook in particular. The other day I was browsing my wife’s Facebook page, as you do. After decades of being together we […]
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An Ordinary Bloke Writes About . . .
This may turn into a regular column, maybe I’ll try and do it once a week. To read all the posts tagged with An Ordinary Bloke – Click Here
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An ordinary bloke writes about ‘Lessons you learn’
An ordinary bloke writes about ‘Lessons you learn’ I was standing in the queue at Iceland, the frozen food store, yesterday. I was clutching a modestly-sized bag (700g) of McCain’s skin-on fries. We were having a dirty burger night and it was the last item on the shopping list. I’d already bought the Linda McCartney […]
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* An Ordinary Bloke Writes About . . . Uber
Uber, the new-fangled taxi people, are in the news after being banned from London. Apparently more than half a million people have signed a petition to have the ban lifted. I don’t believe that. Many of these people are supposedly concerned about the loss of driving jobs the ban will cause, but, everyone knows that […]
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I was (virtually) there
The mainstream media’s coverage of the student protests over tuition fee increases is completely silly. Their collaboration with the police and with the government, unconscious or not, is damaging their reputation as credible sources of news and information. I’ve got to admit that my participation in the demonstrations has been limited to tweeting a few […]