I think I have reconciled myself to being an amateur who writes for pleasure.
I know that the melancholy which afflicts me is completely irrational. I have much to be grateful for. I have a wife who loves me, and I love her. I have a roof over my head, and sound employment. I can afford the cost of living. I have no debts. Life, by all accounts, is …
Looking back, I realise that my shyness paralysed me. It prevented me from achieving lofty heights. Instead of encouraging me and edging me out of my shell, teachers back then simply ignored me. Looking back, I wonder how my parents allowed me to make such a mess of my final years of education, but in …
Most people we meet in our daily lives are not religious. Some identify with a religious community or tradition from a cultural perspective, but more often than not have no interest in the practices or devotions of their particular faith.
Let’s be real about this thing they call “cancel culture”. The only people who need to worry about being cancelled is the Oxbridge set. The rest of us… we’ve spent a lifetime being cancelled, from that first redundancy, through unemployment and unpaid invoices for freelance jobs, to working in internet cafes and driving coffee machines, …
I seem to recall that a decade ago, right-wing thinkers and commentators occupied themselves with trying to cancel the culture of minority groups, arguing for anything from clamping down on their ability to speak freely at universities to demanding that they be deported for said speech. It’s amusing, therefore, to hear the same voices today …
I think catching up with your Alumni / Old School networks must be one of the worst things you can do for your mental health. All those happy-smiley people with fine careers and puffed-up chests. Must content myself with obscurity. My downfall began long ago.
I could not sleep again last night. All night long, memories of my sins, stacking up before me. I wish I had chosen the path of righteousness through all those years, instead of heeding the calls of my scheming self. I’m not very happy these days. I blame that on the realisation that I spent …
If you’re one of these people still going around telling yourself that the global pandemic is just a fiction, completely made up, fabricated to herald some new world order… wake up. It’s not. For some, it is a health emergency.
I find I have become really intolerant of and impatient with noise these days. Just can’t stand it.
Writing is a strange hobby, because you end up with repeated bouts of extreme depression while writing… and then you get an even heavier dose when it’s done, which usually ends with you deleting every word in a fit of melancholic self-censorship. If only I had taken up watercolours instead. I could’ve been a happy …
I say that I fear fame, but I think that what I really fear is rebuke.
I honestly have no idea what people mean when they say, “We should reject wokeism”. Indeed, I have no idea what they mean by “wokeism” at all, though it reminds me a lot of “political correctness gone mad” — which is to say, we oppose disenfranchised people standing up for their rights. Personally, I refuse …
By now we are forgotten. Most we once knew have forgotten us, and we have forgotten them. Amidst 7.7 billion bodies, we are strangers, unknown. Amidst our 68 million countrymen, we are nobodies, known only to a few. We barely know our neighbours; only a few faces on our street.
