For the past couple of weeks, I have had a serious bout of the blues. The shouting, yelling and screaming of the present smashes with full force into my perpetual habitation of the past. It is true: contrary to the habit of the pious believer, I live my life too much in the past, always …
How to make amends for the mistakes of the past? In reflective mode, I have been writing a lot of apologies lately, to those I could at least reach. But what of those lost along the way? I joined a social network for professionals last week in a desperate attempt to rediscover some of my …
This was, perhaps, the best piece of advice I have ever received. It was 1995. I was working a short contract for a software development company in Cambridge, when I learned that the colleague sitting beside me was a published author.
It’s easy to feel despondent sometimes when your career doesn’t seem to be going where you want it to, or when you end up doing something completely different to all your previous learning, but here’s a positive take from a colleague this morning… Life can take us in many different and unexpected directions. Like yourself, …
My present bout of melancholic introspection was forged in the embers of a fitful night of delirium-inducing toothache, which seeded excruciating pain through the entire left side of my body. All of a sudden I found myself twenty-five years back in time, a fresh-faced undergraduate entering a peculiar world. All night long, I found myself …
Who in their right mind would buy a Windows Phone in 2021? Well… I was looking for a OneDrive-connected camera, to enable the children to easily upload and hand in their handwritten school assignments. At £20 from eBay for an ex-business flagship, for this extremely niche requirement, it was my only choice. Indeed, as an …
All of a sudden it occurs to me: if only I had had ambition. If only I had not left university with the blues; if only I had pondered graduate training schemes, opportunities, openings. If only I had had vision. Yes, I have reacquainted myself with the wondrous things old friends have achieved. Directors, CEOs, …
Wait until those billionaires rushing to Mars discover that the residents of Mars rushed to Earth a billion years ago after rendering their planet uninhabitable with Martian global warming!
The world is bigger than one man; this or that social media sensation. What difference does it make if I mention the name of whoever it is I am listening to this week, or whose videos I came across thanks to YouTube‘s very unreliable algorithm this afternoon?
Leaders of men—legitimate and illegitimate—will you not be held to account? Do those making mockery of measures designed to save lives think nothing of the rows upon rows of new graves filling the graveyards of the richest nations on earth? Do they owe nothing to the young men and women who follow them, as they …
For the good of your work, I am with you. I overlook what remains, filtering out the nonsense. My wife, who cannot stand your tomfoolery, says to me, “Why are you listening to that fool?” I say, I take what benefits me and leave the rest. Even so, sometimes it gets too much. I too …
The lies we must tell to feed our nafs. I shudder now, how my domineering nafs dominated me so completely. Numbed now, perhaps, only by minor melancholy, or an endocrine deficiency deliberately mismanaged in the pursuit of sanity. For years and years I led my own soul astray. Nightly, these recollections keep me awake. I …
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The current crisis is an indictment on the current government’s handling of, well, governance over the past decade. It has been given the power to impoverish a generation through a combination of mismanagement incompetence and malice. The Boris Johnson regime is just the latest manifestation of their hopeless stewardship of the social fabric of Britain. …
