Thanks to Ian Wilson! Living in the Dordogne through the 1980s and 1990s one of my close friends, now deceased, was Ian Wilson. I could of course fill pages speaking about him. Larger than life. Deserving of innumerable cliches besides that. However what springs to my mind today is something he said to me in …
Category archives: Uncategorized
Transone
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 …
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 …