My dad

I’ve been able to spend time with my father, this time here in England. He works shifts, in television, and so, on the days he’s off, we’ve gone to lunch together in nearby pubs and, one evening, watched Shakespeare’s “Henry VI, Part 2″ in Camden’s Roundhouse Theatre.
My dad was hard to appreciate when I [...]

Shadows, DH Lawrence

My friend Patrick, over in Taiwan, sent me a series of audio lectures by the British thinker Alan Watts. I’ve now listened to hours of Watts talking about Asian philosophies, death and the self.
Yesterday I came again across this poem, by DH Lawrence, and I thought, Patrick, that you (and possibly Alan) might enjoy [...]

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

I think that slower readers will find “To The Lighthouse” easier and more pleasurable than quick-eyed ones. You read prose like Woolf’s for itself, for its beauty and the thoughts it provokes – you can’t keep skipping down to the next plot-moving point, because you’d skip the whole book. A family is holidaying on the [...]

Birthday photos

Several more on my flicker pages.
It was a great night with lovely people. I cooked, as always, Thai green curry…
Add to a wok on a high-ish heat in this order:
a hearty splash of cooking oil
half a finely chopped onion and two cloves of chopped garlic
chopped chicken (deboned thigh meat) – I used about 12 thighs.
*fry [...]

A kind of rest

It’s my birthday in a couple of days, my first birthday at home in five years. Lots of things have been happening to me, and yet, for the first time in a long while, the urge to write about them is weak. Coming home has brought me a kind of peace. I can tell you [...]