My companions are brilliant, erudite, learned and wise; perceptive, with piercing insight. I sit with them, flummoxed by my own ignorance, confounded by my dumb tongue and my outbursts of unmistakably unhilarious humour. They are the hyperliterate intellectuals our community so desperately needs. I am the court jester, muttering incoherently, constrained by my unmatched, unfailing …
With increasing frequency I suffer from bouts of melancholy. It exhibits itself in periods of unhappiness which come upon me unexpectedly and seemingly for no reason. It also appears – as it has done this afternoon – in the form of heightened emotions. I have written about this in the past, identifying spiritual causes as …
Where are the real men? The latest book I have started reading is the Al-Azhar translation of “The men around the Messenger” which I was given several years ago. Naturally it goes without saying that we are like flies beside these great characters, but still it would be nice to think we were not a …
It is now two years and a month since I was told that I could never have children. The news was broken by a Locum Doctor while my GP was on her summer holidays – he didn’t know much about the disorder, had to look it up in his medical encyclopaedia, then advised me to …
