Blogs

 Imagine this scenario. For centuries, millennia, your ancestors have ploughed the fields of Britain, milking many a moocow, pulling many a lever, scrabbling at many a coalface, been frogmarched off with bayonet, rifle, sword, to stop the whole place from caving in, as they were told by those who owned the silos, who fattened up the empires, whipped the natives, shot the rhinos.  Your ancestors were Irish slaves, Welsh miners, English shepherds, they laid the pipes, they pumped the sewage, dug the roads, were peppered with German bullets, choked on mustard gas, built ships and lorries, stoked engines, mixed cement, ...
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Part 2 after Setting Off For The Soviet Union in 1970 ...
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This is a rewrite of something I first penned in 2004.  Mind you, the core of it might be the same, but I have massively rewritten it ...
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It was a beautiful warm summer evening in Poland. I was sitting in a beer-garden in my shorts and sandals, celebrating the leaving party of Igor, a young Ukrainian man whom I had taught English for the last six months. He was flying back to Kiev the next day, and I was flying back to London for my summer holidays. Igor was a very sociable, popular man-about-town who had organised and hosted many parties while he had been here. The current one was being attended by lots of young people who he knew at the local university. One of these ...
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This is the beginning of a very belated diary. I'd been invited many years ago to stay with friends in the Soviet Union. It took a lot of arranging as my mother lived with me and did not approve. But in the end I went and this describes the first section. Sorry about unexplained Russian and my typos. I don't see well at present ...
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So, I'm new to this and not really sure how it works but I just wanted somewhere to share some things I've been working on.  ...
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The loss of my  beloved pet, Ludo, is devastatingly painful, but everything is subjective isn't it? ...
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Something happened recently which, more than anything else I’ve ever experienced, perfectly encapsulates why it is that I hate the Liberal Left. Someone on Facebook asked for people’s opinions on Tommy Robinson, saying that he wanted to avoid inhabiting an echo chamber. However, this man does indeed live in an echo chamber consisting of all the usual suspects: loud-mouthed young hipsters in their 20s and 30s who now live in London but originally come from somewhere else, mostly places where there aren’t many ethnic minorities. The men all have hairy faces and the women, presumably, all have hairy armpits. Middle-class ...
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Two things to immediately address… you are not, In any way, shape or form, my priority or responsibility anymore You've taught me two more things to add to that: Loving you was a mistake And two, begging to come back to you, even after you give up the game for me I don't want nothing from you right now You're obviously the better one in everyone else’s mind That's whatever; but here I am, over here, wishing you would notice my presence Yet to all my expectancies, you don't I learned to let go of that But here's what hits ...
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So now I am thirty-eight years old. And, not for the first time, I am having to rebuild my life from scratch. I will do this by leaving the culture I grew up in completely and moving to a significantly different one which, surprisingly, is only a few hundred miles away and on the same continent. So how do I feel about Western civilisation? I feel that basically, as Gandhi is purported to have said, “it would be a good idea”. In more detail though, how do I actually feel about the culture in which I have grown up and ...
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