A friend asked me today about engaging in supportive activity in the context of a transgender group here in Sheffield. Firstly, I said, my son doesn’t attend anymore. And then somewhat secondly, I said that I don’t engage with those issues in an understanding, Softly Softly manner. I understand it as rather like a wart …
Author archives: pasdelasbas
Now
So, when in the past I asked some of my friends to let me record them telling stories I had in mind what we might call fairy stories, nursery stories. Something perhaps suitably rustic. When I went to sleep with them to record the stories comma because they were really keen on the idea. I …
Anthropology of Arrogance
At the risk of being hoist by my own petard One of my closest friends when I was at school was a boy called Fabio Leopardi. His father was an Italian ice cream maker of some small renown eventually supplying ice cream to Harrods. His mother the daughter of a Senegalese “Princess” and a French …
Shame
A young Roma man has appeared on a Czech/Slovak Got Talent programme and was very popular, cavorting on the table itself in front of the judges and getting through. He sung in English I was told by people in Sheffield who saw it on cable TV. Roma singers often go on but usually the …
Olympic Mirrors
A classical education even when only exhibited through an appreciation of Greek and Roman architecture is a powerful thing. That is it most elemental form . We experience it frequently in consumption of many artifacts of European heritage in both state and secular buildings. The English public school brought this into play through I suspect a particular fashion …
it’s all those tools!
So. Looking at what appears to be quite a comprehensive graph on Wikipedia of demographic history over the last 12,000 years. Estimates stay stable of 4 up to 7 million until about 4000 BC and then start to move up plateauing somewhere around 170 million by 1000 A.D. It’s all those tools that are doing …
Shocked
Well, yesterday with KA canoeing along the Dordogne I was reminded of an event from our years in the Perigord. We’d bought a house, a little house that we called ‘Le Tournesol’ on the Rue du Calvaire in Le Bugue. We’d loved the little cottage, I’ll write about it another time. Staying …
So I think it’s time for me to learn the rudiments of Arabic and Urdu
“I hate the word integration”
“I hate the word integration” These words were spoken by Michal, a thirty something Roma man from Prague. Brought up in a city where acting like a Gadjo, or an ethnic white Czech, was the way to get on yet later being subject to an attack by an (obviously) violent neo-Nazi skinhead group Michal’s …
3
The sadness of being alone when the lover has gone is finally knowing that the lover is there.