Posted in art, cliques, death, diary, dreams, emotions, experience, family, friends, music, person, society on August 9th, 2010 No Comments »
Whenever I want to write about Dan—apart from maybe the one obligatory and valedictory post—I worry that I’m leaving myself open to charges of solipsism, or at any rate a slight self-obsession and wallowing in it all. It’s all too easy to turn someone else’s minor misfortune into a story about yourself, but the problem [...]
Anyone who has never had to have their ears syringed won’t know what a life-changing experience it is. I say this up front because otherwise such people won’t understand why I would write a blogpost about the experience, let alone such a laudatory one as this.
My ears had started to get blocked earlier this year, [...]
Posted in art, climate, cliques, commerce, consumption, environment, local_independents, location, manufacture, music, near, recycling, retailers, society on April 19th, 2010 No Comments »
I very gladly took part in Record Store Day this year. Witney might not have much, but it does have one of the very few independent record shops in Oxfordshire, and a real gem at that: Rapture Entertainment. The previous time we lived out here I popped in almost every Saturday: it was a fantastic [...]
Posted in anniversaries, art, consumption, drawing, entertainment, family, far_away, here, literature, location, made_our_own_fun, past, person, short_stories, society, time, travel on December 31st, 2009 No Comments »
Every year during the twelve days of Christmas I try to read A Christmas Carol. I maintain that it’s no more or less pathetic or maudlin than watching It’s a Wonderful Life every time it’s on, but then whether that excuses it or not, I couldn’t say. This year, K. rediscovered her complimentary copy of [...]
For those of you who haven’t bought it yet (and how could you not?) there’s a hidden track on the really quite remarkable—the only word for it—Christmas in the Heart by Bob Dylan. Here’s the lyrics to that track, Subterranean Homesick Blue Christmas, for your festive perusal. Merry Christmas, Mr Dylan!
I’m my mother’s son. Yesterday K. kindly let me put the decorations up. I spend every November awaiting the start of December, fidgeting in my seat like a little kid in need of a wee. Christmas lunch with my Granddad last week for his birthday finally made her acquiesce to a slightly early start to [...]
Posted in art, artists, arts_and_crafts, computers, far_away, future, genre, location, media, music, past, plagiarism, speculative_tech, technology, television, time on November 19th, 2009 No Comments »
Momus has discussed the late-70s/early-80s life and times of Alberto Camerini in a recent post. It was in the context of a recent BBC4 documentary Synth Britannia, and he helpfully links to the first ten minutes of the documentary for those of us who—sometimes to our pride, sometimes (like this one) to our shame—don’t have [...]
I’ve been trying with little success to buy a birthday card in Witney for my Granddad. The town has three card shops of note, not including gifty-wifty craft shops which sell cards with hand-affixed twine and sticks for the cost of a takeaway. You’d expect three shops to provide between them at least one card [...]
I’ve been a Popperian for years. That’s not to say I’m a fan of Robert Popper (although I am); rather that I susbscribe broadly to Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. The basic tenet of it is that science advances only through making audacious predictions; that such predictions are ones that ought, given our existing experience, [...]
Most of the days at our parents’ Breton cottage ended up with a lot of red wine and some DVDs. Given that the restaurants that didn’t close were a car journey away and only served meat with meat, it was a good solution to the problem of everyone enjoying their evening.
This also meant K. and [...]
