Just For Lookin' Thru

Just spent a happy few days at the Festival of Words and Ideas at Dartington. Hard to know whether the talks are more fascinating than the audience. Am sated with stimulating conversation. Heaven on earth to spend time with other writers and avid readers, people of passion. On Resurgence Day we were treated to talks by Brian Goodwin and Satish Kumar. Goodwin says he is ‘embedded in the evolutionary process’ and his desire is to articulate that ‘culture is embedded in nature’ not something separate, a construct, apart from it. He emphasizes that, at Schumacher College, study is focussed on the ‘meaning’ in the natural world, which is different from studying the natural world in order to control it. In nature, all is death and transformation. His argument that meaning tends to be associated with language and culture rather than the existence and life of things implies a chasm between the two, that thought and the intellect have moved to inhabit a separate sphere from nature. He says ‘we ...

There’s a lot of excitement in the Press just now, with two car bomb threats averted in London and another at Glasgow Airport. It strikes me as deeply chilling that the London bomb attempts were targeted near nightclubs where hundreds of young people and, in particular, slags (sic) would have been killed or maimed. This is not a terrorist attack against capitalism or even Christianity, or a general lack of faith in the UK but an attack on our women. In the same newspaper I read an article about a magistrate who is apologizing for his unprofessional conduct when he walked out of the Courtroom because a young Muslim woman appeared before him in a hijab with a mere slit for her eyes to peep through. I have no idea what she had done to require a presence before the beak, but identity must surely be called into question in Court. She is apparently hurt and outraged at being asked to unveil where men are present. However, anyone could have been under that veil, her uncle for instance, sent a...

I had an interesting talk today with a self-titled anarchist. There seemed to be some confusion when challenged, as to what the definition was. I took the line that throwing red wine all over someone's £2,000 cashmere coat was a pointless act, resulting in nothing, as well as being a personal attack, and not a political one. The reply to this was that he had no business wearing such an expensive coat. We discussed this point at length with my line being that one cannot judge a person by his appearances, but by his actions. Assumptions often later turn out to be incorrect. This seems to me to be more of an imagined 'class war' in which people with chips on their shoulders resent the success of others. In defence of my argument I had to use myself as an example, always a bit of a weak move, to demonstrate that, having been seriously impoverished in childhood, I now like to have nice things. Anyone meeting me now would assume I had had a reasonable upbringing, which is very fa...

Legislation must enforce planners and builders to build all new housing to high specification, in terms of low impact on the environment, energy-efficient, sensitively designed for maximum social harmony but, particularly insisting upon the incorporation of wonderful insulation, wood instead of stone, three or four storey instead of a mere short-assed two. Loss of land cannot continue, small spaces suffocate, shoddy building along with get-rich-quick builders and developers are short-term measures that make the UK an ugly landscape. To look back for a moment, the design of Georgian houses incorporated a cellar for storage, three floors and more above ground, with interiors designed to be spacious and elegant, unlike the alienating high rises constructed in the 1960s. Terracing was a common feature of Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian building, taking up minimum square footage whilst allowing generous space indoors. These old buildings are fetching the highest prices. Rather than advoca...