I have noticed over the last 10 years when I have been involved in increasing amounts of voluntary work that I encountered a number of people who have been brought up in families where parents or grandparents were missionary workers. Statistically such people do not account for the large numbers but nevertheless it is quite …
Author archives: pasdelasbas
for Coco
So I will try and gather my thoughts from what I was speaking about the other day. It won’t be easy because it is rare that I can see this particular concept as clearly as I did on that day. In death we stop existing. Our bodies fail then stop functioning and everything that we …
Capsules and Violence
Wandering through Birmingham I’m struck, as I was last time I was here I think, by Birmingham feeling edgier, more violence around. I walked past an entrance to Debenhams and there were store security guards, dressed exactly as bouncers do, protecting the doors and looking as if they were waiting for some trouble or had …
Tea
It is almost as if I always have to have something to do which has absolutely no value other than my own pleasure and of course some form of associated commercial transaction. In other words as my parents always said to me and I’ve not heard said since: money burns a hole in your pocket. …
Circuses and Sochi
The idea of bread and circuses. What does that mean always works in my mind. There is the idea that it was wrong to offer bread and circuses, to dupe a population by letting blood. Somehow also we just don’t really understood the blood lust and sit with the notion that it was also something …
Gravity (the film)
Not exactly a well thought out review. I really didn’t like the film Gravity at all. It is four or five weeks since I went to see the film so my initial anger has subsided. In retrospect I can see the attraction of the visuals but at the time I was overwhelmed by the vacuous …
12 Years a Slave
12 Years a Slave Despite the fact that it seems mean mouthed of me to criticise this film I will do that anyway. I had read no reviews of this film at all. I only knew that it had been made by the Turner art prize winner and that a West Indian friend of mine …
Travelling and Value
Yesterday, a friend, as they say, heard that her partner was invited for a two week walking tour in Sri Lanka. It was immediately clear and fine that the partner would go but it left my friend feeling somewhat sore. This is then partly a short tale of a very boring moment of jealousy but …
The New Birmingham Library
I was in Birmingham today and took the time to visit the new Birmingham Library. I’d heard about it on the dreaded Radio 4 when a few weeks ago they’d run a hugely positive effectively promotional report on it prior to opening. It had opened earlier this week and as it was a Saturday today …
Bull Street Quaker Meeting House
Amazing site just of Bull Street in the centre of Birmingham. A small lane leads off the main road between to giant buildings and there hidden lies the Quaker Meeting House somehow surviving the high rise developments around it. It is however not run by the Meeting but by a private conference company who allow …