When I was 8, my parents got me a library card. It allowed me to borrow up to three books at a time. Books took me to wondrous and otherwise inaccessible places, put me in the company of fascinating ideas and people. Advocates of the book banning movement sluicing across the U.S.,… Read the rest
When Joni Mitchell sang “You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone”, she was referring to love and the beauty of Nature. Having recently lost – temporarily and not drastically – visual acuity in one eye, I can add a few more things to her list, and they’re not all bad.… Read the rest
As a former broadcast journalist, what I’m about to confess amounts to heresy: at the moment I neither have, nor miss having, a TV set. That’s due in no small part to being where more intimate and gentle ways measure and put the world into perspective.… Read the rest
Perspective changes everything. Or, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet put it: …there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
Hamlet was musing on being a prisoner, but his insight carries a lesson for the would-be saviours of children who have imposed hundreds of changes to the late Roald Dahl’s stories.… Read the rest
PLEASE BE ADVISED: The following includes cynicism, mockery, incredulity and what the subjects of the exercise may consider an insulting tone. Children exposed to adults who require this and similar ‘trigger warnings’, however, may find it useful.… Read the rest
Autumn has arrived. For the next several weeks the inexorable change in the colours of the forest that envelopes us here challenges description. A fitting word would be “awesome”. Unfortunately, despite at least a dozen synonyms, it’s a rote response to everything from the truly awe-inspiring to the most prosaic, which strands it in a verbal wasteland.… Read the rest
Opening an Internet browser ought to come with a “viewer advisory” warning: “You are about to be carpet-bombed with scare-mongering advertising and the media’s obsession with doom and health stories”. That being unlikely, I suggest those us of old enough to remember it adopt the catchphrase of MAD Magazine’s Alfred E.… Read the rest
The Peanuts character Linus once said: “There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people…religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.” Pumpkins aside, the rare convergence of Passover, Easter and Ramadan prompts me to ignore his wisdom and ponder why faith is so often used as an excuse for venal behaviour.… Read the rest