Make myself a pot of freshly ground coffee at 10am. As I’m waiting for it to brew, a spot of dust catches my eye. I’ll just vaccuum that up. Three hours later, I’ve accidentally cleaned the entire house. It’s only as I finish a whizz around the kitchen that I notice the coffee pot staring …
In truth, we’re all just pawns in Great Games between global powers, north and south. The United States and Russia, Saudi and Iran, Britain and France, each of them vying for dominance. In these Great Games, the common man is merely cannon fodder. When elephants fight…
Without a firm foundation, you’re cut adrift. I always feel I lack that foundation. Whether that’s true or not, I can’t really say. If we were to draw our lives as a graph, sloping upwards to the right, I’d see the first few years of mine flatlining before finally beginning to rise only with a …
He drives into our yard, triggering our motion sensing camera. The camera zaps his registration plate. Then he gets out and walks straight towards the camera, so we get a good look at his face. I don’t recognise him, either as a friend, relative or neighbour. He spends a couple of minutes looking around — …
Striving for perfection, which is impossible, I rarely finish my personal projects. And when I do finish something, I usually then obliterate it in a fit of melancholic resolve, consigning every trace of it to the dustbin of history. Perhaps it would be better if I just stopped starting things.
Dare to humanise them in your heart.
“There’s no room at the inn. We’re only a small country. We can’t take all these people.” Our nation in home to about one percent of the world’s 27 million refugees. Turkey hosts 3.7 million of them. Germany hosts the highest number in Europe. However, most refugees are hosted by states neighbouring areas of displacement. …
There is no moral high ground in war. The best you can do is limit harm. The moral high ground was ceded weeks ago, and all the world could see it. Only politicians and the arms industry (usually intertwined) had any trouble articulating that truth. The moral high ground was lost the moment the corrupt …
It’s funny how our ideas of neighbourhood expands in proportion to distance travelled. In the new year, I will have to take my mother-in-law to Istanbul. So I’ve been saying, “While I’m in the neighbourhood, I might visit our place.” But of course Inverness and Plymouth are closer together than our place is to Istanbul. …
If a decade ago our little market town felt like a sleepy backwater, it now seems to be getting crowded. In part, we might attribute this perception to rising car ownership, with many households now running multiple vehicles. Several of our neighbours have to accomodate work vans as well as their family car, for example. …
In life we discover that whatever we wrongly attribute to others, we end up doing ourselves.
Is it really so hard to say, “Yes, we condemn all attacks on civilians, whoever they are and whoever the perpetrator”?
Everything has a context, and you have to view it in its context. If you don’t have the context… the historical backdrop, an awareness of the protagonists, familiarity with the social landscape… all understandings will be provisional at best.
I’m sure there’s much more blessing in my wife’s cooking. Whenever I cook, though it seems to take me ages, it never seems to fill us up. Just as I finish the washing up, it occurs to me, “I’m still hungry.” I’ll be making toast before bed.
I don’t think any kind of supremacist ideology is good for the soul of man. To believe that you’re better than another simply because of who you are. Individuals and societies can only make progress if they recognise their true state.
