Yesterday eveving I attended Evensong at Wells Cathedral. I had gone assuming that it would be a sung Evensong but found myself in St Martins Chapel amongst a small group of worshippers with the Book of Common Prayer in my hands. I experience formalised worship like this as something akin to those little wisdom expressions …
Category archives: Uncategorized
Le Tour & weaving biographies
The Tour de France has just passed through Sheffield. There must be an enormous amount of writing concerning different ways that this race affects people and places. Over the two days the tour was in Yorkshire they estimate 2 ½ million people were out watching it. The tour is always followed by helicopters which give …
letter to a dying friend
No need for reply dearest Richard – it is me that needs to write. I think about death quite a lot. Since being with my much adored mother through her death – life changed for me. Before reading your post I saw a woman I know a little this morning. Our eyes met and in …
JS
What strikes me about this case is that the 1960s and 1970s saw popular public broadcasting increasingly wishing to integrate broadcasters as contemporary entertainers themselves. Throughout the 1960s the driving forces of popular music (men) were people perceived as challenging public mores of sobriety and decency. The 1960s took forward a liberal agenda whether that …
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. …
Darwin
Darwin’s theory of evolution developed the first unifying theory offering to explain all aspects of human life with no attention paid to cultural or other social differences. Darwin’s theory allowed us from the West who understood it (perhaps) to suggest that there was an evolutionary route that took us back to shared ancestry perhaps …
Leader notes
Yesterday, the 3rd August, I was listening to report on radio 4 of the endorsement of Hassan Rouhani by the Supreme Leader. I can’t find the audio file to link to it but there was in the background this extra-ordianary soviet style choral singing going on that seemed so unlike what I would have expected. …
snow
paracademia
Paracademia is where you bring academic knowledge to work in fields not strictly academic, or where the non-academic works within academia as a partner. The paracademic is ever more present as on one hand academic paid work is in retreat and on the other academia is obliged by new regimes to engage with the outside …