A contribution of mine for the people’s panel on The Guardian’s comment is free section: * * * A strong smell in the car park heralded an in-store promotion. I hate being manipulated as much as I hate the smell of fish, so was immediately irked. It was the first time we had been to [...]

Things fail – bicycles, cars, washing machines, governments, recipes and businesses. A failure is something that has failed, fair enough. For me though, that word has always been impossible to apply to a person. Someone who failed to make an appointment because of a traffic jam may have failed to arrive on time but is [...]

Christmas is snow and feasting and fire and preserves. Christmas is calm and peaceful. Christmas is generous and spiritual. Christmas is short cold days and long colder nights – it is the darkest time of the year when life retreats to its lair and prays for its own renewal. The festival of Christmas sits like [...]

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 [...]

I just got interviewed for the Selling Books website. Click Here to read the interview and get a glimpse into the twisted mind of the narrator Related Posts:The True Meaning of ChristmasI was (virtually) thereCreating a Text

(This from about three years ago) Today we went to town. We walked most of the way through the park, alongside the river. On the way saw a few interesting things. People were walking, some running or cycling. People had dogs, some had human companions. We saw jays hopping about and flittering into trees, (they [...]