Written April 2025 This is good news of course though more importantly it is beyond depressing that our institutions have been so thoroughly captured by nonsense beloved of bad faith activists running rings around people educated beyond their intelligence. It is right that people are celebrating, and we should congratulate the brave women leading the campaigns, but the fact remains that the Law in nearly all important senses does not define what a woman is: we do. The legal ruling’s important political consequence is that it makes monkeys of large numbers of our credentialed class: we should never underestimate how...
Written March to April 2025 Very briefly, the Trump tariffs are very important. Whether they are the best way of upending the global economic order is doubtful; I don’t think Trump particularly cares, getting people’s attention that actual meaningful change is happening is the point. Change for the economic order that broke in 2007 and has been made worse by the actions of politicians since is long, long overdue. The world of dollar hegemony, unipolarity, China dumping its surplus of manufactured goods, the EU pretending it is a big shot through its regulatory prowess etc etc are gone. What replaces...
Written February 2025 I thought I’d put down a few words after a really fantastic weekend spent in Torquay. Not words I ever thought I’d write to be honest but life is full of surprises. Anyway, my wife and I spent 48 hours from Friday late afternoon in the wonderful, if dated, surrounds of the Livermead House Hotel in Torquay for the inaugural English Riviera Backgammon Congress. It was my sixth (I think) tournament and Ruth’s second. It was organised with backgammon friends who we have been playing with for some time in Tavistock and Plymouth and so was a...
Written January 2025 I have a lot of time for Paul Kingsnorth as a writer and thinker. He’s now an Orthodox Christian but I first came across him through his book Real England: The Battle Against The Bland which was published in 2009. This was written when he was primarily an environmentalist of some sort with an overlay of atheism/wicca/paganism (he seemed to chop and change quite regularly, a proper quester!). I loved this book as it articulated lots of things I had long felt but felt unable to really express on the flattening down and homogenisation of our country...
Written 17 October 2024 The government has announced that Parliament will debate a private members’ bill on assisted dying in the coming session so as this is an issue I have taken quite an interest in for some time I thought it would be good to set down a few thoughts on it. None of these will be original, this is not definitive and I expect to change my views over the coming years (as my views have changed up till now). First off I think people on both sides of the debate are almost without exception motivated by principle...
Written 24 April 2024 I read this some weeks ago and have been meaning to put some thoughts down on it. The writers are people I came across on Twitter and podcasts during the long, interminable Brexit wars of 2016-20. They were among the few decent commentators I found on the whole sorry spectacle, certainly ahead of any elected politicians, mainstream SW1 think tankers or media journalists, largely because they had a coherent analysis of the nature of both the EU and the UK and the relationship between the two. Analysis is the key word really. There were few on...
Written 18 April 2024 I’ve now finished my second reading of Ulysses so some more thoughts. Approach I got myself a copy of the 2022 Oxford edition with the introduction by Jeri Johnson. This seemed like one with enough notes, explanations and a good foreword to be useful without being unwieldy. It also includes a map (which is not very legible to be honest) and the two schema. It’s got lots of typos in it as it basically replicates the 1922 edition as actually published. It could be easier on the eye print-wise but it’s a nice book. In parallel...
Written 14 March 2024 I made it through Ulysses, finishing it just before the beginning of Lent. I managed it through a combination of kindle, audiobook on Spotify and (once I’d reached my monthly usage limit) a librevox podcast. The kindle was fine and the audiobook was excellent, but perhaps the less said about the librevox podcast the better. With episodes being read by a variety of contributors, all with different accents, their renderings of the text were somewhat variable to say the least. Some were very good, but one was not a native English speaker, and Americans really struggled...
Written 02 February 2024 I saw this last night at Plymouth Arts Cinema. The cinema itself was much fuller than normal, possibly because the film is nominated for Best Picture, but it was good to watch a film in a great venue with lots of other people; about a dozen is a good turn out for the films we tend to go and see there! It’s a long film, about two hours and twenty minutes long and I have to say that for the first hour and three quarters I was not enjoying it at all. The film presents us...
Written 26 May 2023 I went with my wife to see this last night at the excellent Plymouth Arts Cinema. Described as “Japan’s submission for this year’s Oscars…set in a chilling, near future in which the country has gone to extreme lengths to manage its ageing population and consequent economic distress” I was very much looking forward to it. I’m interested in end of life and demographic questions as I see them growing in importance over the coming years as well as providing a real insight into fundamental shifts in societal values currently underway. Plan75 is a joint Japanese/French production....
