“And relax. Put your feet up. Well, that was a day, wasn’t it? Anyway, you made it through and that’s not nothing. In fact, you deserve a reward. Glass of wine? Good idea. Just a cheeky one, mind. You’ve earned it.” With minor variations, this dialogue gets performed in countless heads across countless lands every […]
My old tutor, a monk, towards the end of his life, told me that he had spent seventy years looking for something he had possessed all along. He was not a philosopher, nor a particularly religious man (I know, odd for a monk), but in that moment he spoke with a clarity that rendered all our books and arguments superfluous. His words have stayed with
I have been in Prague this week for the first time. While I love many European and Eastern European capital cities such as Vienna and Budapest, Prague knocks those two places into a cocked hat. The architecture is stunning and mainly intact as the Allied bombing here in the Second World War was very light and, on one occasion, accidental. In common with Budapest and Vienna,
“Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.” Arthur Balfour (attrib.) It took, it is said, seven days for news of Abraham Lincoln’s death to reach London. This was comparatively speedy – Australia had to wait the best part of a month. By contrast, everyone with a phone or TV learned of the
Sublime Indifference Read More »
Second thoughts seem to be a feature of my life. Not, I think, due to chronic indecision or a personality prone to regret, but because that is just the way my mind seems to work. A thought bubbles up, seemingly from nowhere, and then I decide what to do with it. If it is interesting
On Second Thoughts Read More »
We are yet again paying the price of another ‘woke’ rebrand; this time, the burden will fall on our own pockets. British banknotes are set to change as the historical figures will be replaced by images of wildlife. This spells the end for the figures who have featured on the notes for over 50 years.
A Costly Mistake from The Bank of England? Read More »
Schadenfreude is, we can assume, a universal human emotion. Barely had the first Iranian strikes been launched towards the U.A.E., than some social media users felt the need to point this fact out to the country’s expats. Yes, the weather may be nice, the lack of income tax attractive, but neither were worth finding oneself at
The Lines Were Already on the Page Read More »
Cook Ding was a master, butchering animals with balletic precision. So impressive was his craft that one day his employer, Lord Wen Hui, asked for an explanation. He hadn’t always had the skill, the cook said. When he started, he had seen the animal in its totality, just one big hunk of meat, so he
Recently, following a single complaint, a TfL video telling men not to harass women has been pulled, because it features a black person doing the harassing. So continues our Orwellian, inverted looking glass universe that the political and media class like to promulgate. I have some knowledge of what things are like on the streets of
“You should have stayed at university and become a philosopher,” my Dad told me one day. This wasn’t quite as random as it might sound. We’d had dinner a few weeks earlier and he had told me that he had seen there was going to be a documentary about Wittgenstein on TV. Knowing that I
Sitting at the Mouth of the Cave Read More »
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