Top posts
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First Post
Hello, and welcome to my blog! As a complete novice to this, please expect a few glitches until I get a bit more confident. I thought that seeing I will shortly be off to Saudi Arabia, and living on my own for a couple of months, I might usefully occupy...
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Home Thoughts from Abroad.....
Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, I must have been 10 or 11 when I was first introduced to this poem by Robert Browning. Rather young maybe, but in those days, we were often treated to such literary gems at the primary school level, and amazingly,...
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Latest News
It’s been a roller coaster of a week. Firstly, for anyone reading this that doesn’t yet know; please welcome Alexander Andrew Logue into the world. Our second grandchild was born on October 18 in Calgary, and my thanks to our first, Marilena, (who is,...
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God Bless America!
When I trained to be a teacher in the early 1970s, it was compulsory to do three periods of assessed teaching practice. For my second of these, lasting a little over a month, I was fortunate enough to be selected for a school on a US Air Force base in...
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Ageing Disgracefully
The redoubtable Irene Handle John Fortune was once in a TV show with Irene Handl. It involved color separation, a technique then in its infancy, and the enthusiastic young director thought he should explain the process to Miss Handl at the outset. Swathed...
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Publish and be damned.......
Last night, I watched a BBC documentary about Salman Rushdie and his 10-odd years of living in fear of his life because of the Fatwa imposed by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. It raised all sorts of questions . Principally, these were concerned with freedom...
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Two Poems
I've been sorting out my hard disc today, deleting all kinds of rubbish, saving other stuff that might be useful in future. In the process, I came upon two poems, both downloaded via Google at some point in the past, because they were old friends and...
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Dr Clifton Chadwick
I like the mutual back scratching of this blogging business. A while back, my good friend Clifton Chadwick, sent me details of his new blog, and so, when I set this one up, I gave him a mention in my 'Links' section. Jokingly, I sent him an email asking...
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The Euthanasia Debate
If you read the British press, I'm sure you'll have seen a great deal about this subject recently, and today there was more of it in the Guardian. Apparently, Gordon Brown is against relaxing the law on assisted suicide - i.e. whether or not relatives...
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The Road Not Taken
I have always loved this Robert Frost poem, even as a teenager, before I really took on board its wider implications. I was particularly reminded of it this week, as a result of the power of the internet in general, and Google in particular. Between 1970...
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The Potting Shed
Delays on my e-ticket to Saudi Arabia have meant something of a stay of execution, so I'm still here in Cyprus, happily blogging away. In view of news items about religion, most notably the atheist bus in the UK, and the increasingly worrisome polarisation...
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Al Khobar
We often need reminding that simply because we leave a place, things don't stand still in our absence. It has been eleven years since I last visited Al Khobar in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia - a place I lived in, almost continuously, for ten years....
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The E-Reader
My Sony E-Reader duly arrived exactly one week ago today, and first impressions straight out of the box while at work were favourable. Problems arose, however, as soon as I got home. The software that came with it on CD, steadfastly refused to install...
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"The Dead" by James Joyce
I remember many years ago, a teacher saying to me that "The Dead" (the last story in Joyce's Dubliners) was the finest short story ever written in English. I duly read it (in fact, all of Dubliners) and failed to see what all the fuss was about. Funny...
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Some thoughts about Shakespeare's Birthday
No one knows for certain when Shakespeare was born. The fact that he was baptised in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon during late April, has suggested to many authors that his actual birth day was April 23rd, which is, coincidentally of course,...
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E-Readers and E-Books
Can you ever have enough books? In my case, the answer is probably no. The living room at home in Cyprus has five large bookcases, all fully stocked, and there are several others in both Helen's office and my own. It has become a worry knowing where to...
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Quote - Unquote
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts , 1932 My father used to say: "The school of experience is the finest school in the world, but its fees are the most expensive."...
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What I Have Lived For
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward...
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John Updike
If I were ever put on the spot and asked to name my favorite books, I would have to say novels. Although as a literature student, I had to study poetry, drama and a variety of literary criticism as well, it was to novels that I returned as a first love....
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What do they know of cricket.........?
To quote the great West Indian writer, C.L.R. James: What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? It's over thirty years since I read his wonderful book, Beyond a Boundary, and more than forty since I sat on the boundary ropes at Lords and the...
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Taking liberties
I have recently been reading an interesting new book entitled What Price Liberty? by Ben Wilson. In a closely argued text, looking historically from the English Civil War to the present day, his basic premise is that today, we are in danger of losing...
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Butterfly Boy (1)
What follows this week, is a new departure for me. Since arriving in Saudi back in April, I have amused myself from time to time with writing some fiction. I have been doing this off and on for over 40 years, but chiefly for my own amusement. It occurred...
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Butterfly Boy (2)
III For the first couple of months, Harry Wentworth got on fine in Saudi Arabia. The job was excellent, and because there was a real sense of urgency about it, he felt free of what he often considered the petty restrictions of home. In the past, he had...
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The enemy of my enemy ......
So far, in all the blog posts of the past months, I have consciously not mentioned the horrific acts that have defined members of my family these past six years: the murder of my son, Michael, and my ex-wife, Dorothy on January 28, 2003. The fact that...
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Nostalgia ain't what it used to be........
Firstly my apology for the lack of posts these past couple of weeks. As you might have expected, with Helen arriving in Saudi, and with a new home for us to establish (as well as both of us in full time, demanding jobs) there hasn’t been a lot of time...