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You know the feeling; you’ve read a damn-good book and then the film comes out. What do you do? Do you watch some chump mash up a perfect story or do you give it a chance? That’s how I’m feeling about ‘High Rise.’ I love JGB’s book, and yes, I’ve bought the film on Blu ray. But, I haven’t watched it yet. The story is compelling in the sense that the characters choose the hell they end up living…

What’s Your Connection?

So another shooter shoots up a shopping mall. You can call him a stupid teenage prick, you can call him a soldier of whatever, you can call him another brainwashed victim of the curse of Religion… but in fact he was a human being who made a connection. To negation. So what is your connection? Coz if you don’t chose you will get chosen. Jesus talked about ‘blessed are the spiritually poor, blessed…

We’ve had days, weeks, years, centuries, millennia of hatred. You can dress it up in whatever disguise you like: religion, nationalism, football teams, whatever, its so damn easy to hate, particularly if you feel your are the victim. Hate goes down real easy, it feels good, but the hangover hurts like hell. The obvious solution? Hair of the dog – more hate. Forgiveness? Impossible surely. How can…

Living on Borrowed Time

… without a thought for tomorrow. We live, breathe, shop, play football, watch football, eat, sleep, make love, with either the faraway concept that one day we die and that is it, or the faraway concept that one day we die and there is so much more. Each of us has to choose our own ludicrous. Despair is a process, the eating away of belief in a meta-meaning until all that is left is us as kings…

The Proof for God

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01HNCG2H2 I was reading ‘The God Delusion’ as RD sets up and systematically demolishes every claimed proof for the existence of the Big Man in the sky.  Richard Dawkins states in the Preface that ‘if this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down. What presumptuous optimism! Of course, dyed -in-the-wool faith-heads are…

Lewis’s ‘Screwtape’, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, Blake’s ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ and the Book of Job all take the point of view of Satan, the Enemy, and use it to reflect the point the author is looking to make. The great difficulty with staring into the abyss is the point that Nietzsche makes, namely that the abyss can stare right back into us. But then that is reality, we live that every…

I remember train journeys. For some reason they stick in my mind. I remember going to Southport as a child and losing my bear. I remember travelling to Scotland and the land was under a blanket of snow (I was visiting a university and had ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ by The Waterboys on my Walkman). Other times I look through train windows and see a despoiled land that doesn’t seem to give a shit. Other…

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01HNCG2H2 We all feel it, we all enjoy a dose of righteous anger, but where does it lead to? Where is the end of the line? The answer in my experience is that it usually makes the situation worse. Not that I’m any kind of angel. I’m as bad as everyone else. Anger is step two of the Will to Negation. Step one is isolation, the anxiety of hopelessness. Step three is…

The Abyss That Laughs at Creation

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01HNCG2H2 ‘The Abyss That Laughs At Creation’ is an illuminated book. I had the privilege to see some of William Blake’s original books in the John Rylands Library in Manchester last year. We live in time of crisis, change, revolution and uncertainty, as did Blake. My own country voted this week to exit the EU. I voted to stay, my parents voted out. We are a nation…

Clifford’s Tower

In York there stands a tower that is a tourist attraction, a tower that people walk past on their way to do their shopping. But this tower was the scene of riot, murder and suicide. It stands in the mists of medieval time: long enough for modern English people to feel that the murder of York’s Jews was a distant aberration committed by mad people. Not us. We couldn’t do that. We could never hate…

    The check out fella in Tesco tells me that Protestants drink Bushmills and Catholics drink Jameson’s. I like him: a cockney in a Lancashire town, always pleasant, always friendly. That said, his whiskey advice gives me a problem that even Kierkegaard might struggle to solve. I like both. I wonder what brand Methodists drink?

Ich Bin, Ich Kann, Ich Werde

Two anti-parallel forces held together by nucleotide bonds. X=Y yin and yang Tripartite source code meaning – dynamic – motoric action Lewin’s force-field I will, I can, I will.

The Four Horsemen of the Soccalypse

  Reason oh reason To doubt you is treason Between the certainty of Faith Between the certainty of Science I, the heathen   Primates in Reiss suits Primates in Nike boots You pay me for my rage I pay you for my rage Power pollutes

The Guardian of Her Children’s Bones

I was too old, my house too small, my patience too thin, all my energy spent caring for my husband as the flesh shrank from his bones. I who had lived with gathering shadow of the end, now had to endure the bitter shards of joy in the eyes of a child. My daughter’s death had killed the little hope left in my heart. What a fool I’d been to believe in the sun. Winter always follows. Now I knew the…