Late adopter

In spite of mockery from my peers, I still use a VCR to record TV programmes and movies. This is partly due to laziness and partly due to practical considerations. I already have a video recorder, it works perfectly well, and the quality is acceptable (yes, it could be better, but I don’t really need to [...]

Old haunts

When travelling from one country to another I much prefer taking the train to flying.  The plane has its own pleasures, but travelling by rail, apart from offering (slightly) more legroom, also gives me the time to acclimatise to my destination. Passing through a country, rather than over it, you see the gradual changes in landscape, [...]

Don’t be a stranger

Recently I found a couple of people through Facebook with whom I hadn’t been in touch for over a decade. I’m not the kind of person who feels the need to “friend” everyone with whom I’ve ever exchanged three words, but these two were people I’d spent time with, got drunk with, laughed with, and then [...]

Gulliver’s Travels

Going back to the UK is always a weird, dislocating experience, and becomes moreso as the years go by. While I stay in contact with the motherland to a certain extent via the media, and still have friends living there, there’s no substitute for being immersed in the culture full-time, and the occasional few days [...]

In the swim

The other day I took my daughter to the swimming pool. We stayed in the small, splashy-fun pool, but I could see (and, more importantly, hear) the main pool. I hate swimming pools. I always have. I didn’t learn to swim until I was 12, and I’m still a fairly weak swimmer now. Before that, swimming [...]

Could do better

I spent the morning browsing through some old school reports (yes, I’ve kept them all). Looking at them now, apart from the endless “could do better, must try harder, not fulfilling his potential” stuff that at least three or four teachers mentioned every year, there are some surprising (and surprisingly pleasant) comments. Age 9: Physical [...]

Newcomer

From a book I’m currently reading: “Initially the community may welcome us warmly – even overwhelmingly. But in every culture the newcomer is still exactly that – and newcomers by definition don’t fit in yet. Our basic position in the new community is one of statuslessness. We carry knowledge from past experiences – often including [...]

Next to godliness

When I told a friend of mine a while ago that we’d decided to hire a cleaner, his response was “Why pay someone else to do something you can do yourself?” To which my reply was naturally “Why do something myself when I can pay someone else to do it for me?” Ok, so there’s a limit [...]

Lighting candles

It’s not often I find myself in agreement with the Vatican, but something they said recently about this year’s Oscar-winning films caught my attention, and chimed with thoughts I’d been having recently on the same topic. Basically their complaint is that, this year at least, the Academy rewarded films which are ”filled…with hopelessness”. I’ve seen “No [...]

Are you human?

From a book I’m currently reading: “We were all terrible when we were little. Did you ever see how vicious and monstrous kids are to each other? And I’m not just talking about in the sandbox either, where they bang each other over the head with their trucks! Teenagers…God, teach them for a while if you [...]