May
20
2022
I am fascinated by the BBC’s current drama Conversations with Friends. I know of few works that shed so revealing a light on contemporary society. The lead characters, Frances and Nick, are self-absorbed, unhappy and bored. They never seem to ask themselves...
May
13
2022
If the UK switched to a plant-based diet – and used regenerative farming to produce food on the arable land we have (not using artificial fertilisers or pesticides) – how much could we be self-sufficient in food, percentage-wise? dad_climate
The calculations...
May
05
2022
People only allow themselves the luxury of doing wrong in the full knowledge they are doing wrong when they commit relatively small offences. If I fiddle my taxes by asking to be paid in cash I know I shouldn’t but...
Apr
28
2022
It is strange or perhaps inevitable that a world supposedly led by science and reason should have become so uncaring of science and so irrational. Trans people claim to really be the sex other than biology plainly says...
Feb
12
2022
Richard Dawkins So Right and So Wrong (thinking too about Freud)
(According to Bruno Bettelheim, who was brought up in the Vienna in which Freud had lived, the translation of Freud’s writing into English has been a disaster. According to him,...
Feb
12
2022
BABBLING OF GREEN FIELDS
A Confession
by
Thomas Jackson
‘A parted just between twelve and one,
even at the turning o’th’tide – for after
I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play
With flowers and smile upon his finger’s end, I knew there was but one way. For...
Feb
12
2022
Father Philip was housemaster of Caverel and in 1970 I was appointed to be his assistant housemaster. A fireball of energy, he taught classics and fencing – indeed, at least one of his pupils became an Olympic fencer – and...
Feb
05
2022
How can I even begin to describe Wappy? Father Wulstan Phillipson had been attached to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin before, as he always implied though never quite said, abandoning a glittering dramatic career to join the monastery. His English classes...
Feb
02
2022
The Fall in Genesis 3:1-24
The most striking aspect of the story of the fall of mankind in Genesis is that God proves to be wrong and the serpent right. Eve tells him that God has forbidden herself and Adam...
Jan
30
2022
You think of monasteries as happy, peaceful and ordered places. I rapidly discovered this wasn’t Downside. Ever since its foundation in 1605 in Flanders there had been division between the young turks who wanted the danger of the English mission...