Thank you!
Just a little note en passant to say thank you to those people who visit this blog even though I haven't posted on it for nearly a year. I'm really pleased that there's stuff here that some people (you...
View ArticleGoodbye and hello
I feel this blog is coming to the end of its days, so I am going to sign off in a mo. All my mighty words will still be here until...? Google kills Blogger off? The End of Time?But my very close friend...
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"Je Suis Charlie" says Gloria Mundi - part 2
Will Self put it neatly on Channel 4 TV news the other evening. He pointed out that if you make freedom of speech (and drawing)a universal, non-negotiable right, you are turning it into something like...
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"Je Suis Charlie" says Gloria Mundi
So, big deal announcement, but:We must all be Charlie, now and always.Such lethal derangement cannot "win" anything. What have these psychopaths achieved? They have caused death, grief and suffering to...
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Celine Dion and me - funeral music
The impossibly wealthy and successful Ms Dionis not really my thing, to put it mildly. The whole big voice power ballad overwrought style leaves me cold. But. Many a British funeral is for, or is...
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Language Follies and a HNY
First off: A Happy 2015 to my reader, and thanks for stopping by. Wouldn't it be good if we could clear away some linguistic clutter in 2015? I don't mean the simply daft stuff, I mean the misleading...
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"We never keep to the present," said Pascal
I can't remember a better description of the destructiveness of ignoring the present moment than this: "We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too...
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Digital cloning - mortality awareness, artificial intelligence and the end of...
This remarkable human being:has warned us that artificial intelligence (computer power equal to the human brain)could threaten the survival of homo sapiens. He's a smart bloke and we'd do well to...
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Mortality: if you're mortal, this book should help. If you think you're not...
This man (surgeon, researcher, teacher) Atul Gawande, has written a really important book. "Being Mortal" pulls together a lot of what many people have been saying for quite a long time: late and...
View ArticleFunerals: Give them what they want?
This is a "funerals" post, so if you'd like to side-step it, that's fine by me, though Andrew Marr's BBC Radio 4 programme this morning made it pretty clear that thinking about death - yours - from...
View ArticleHarmony, and that Stephen Taberner live magic.
Singing as well as you can, with a goodly number of other non-professional singerswho were almost all strangers until the previous morning; singing a simple but powerful little song in the mighty...
View ArticleDying with dignity, funerals with dignity, depend on uniqueness
Your cursor over the title will take you to a BBC "Points of View" transcript of today's broadcast. Don't be misled by the title, it's not part of the assisted dying debate, it's simply about how...
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we are pluralities - meditation and the striving ego
It seems to me that we are not single entities, but pluralities, full of the voices and gestures of people we have known, the places we have lived, and then some. We are unfolding processes, and our...
View ArticleSerenade - a poem by John Fuller
This poem links in my mind with my post about the fear of death, 02:10:14; I hope Mr Fuller doesn't mind my reprinting in full his fine poem, which I found in The Spectator, 4th October 2014, page...
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The psychological appeal of polarised views: adolescence, The Process,...
I had two good friends at school who became heavily inolved in what became a full-blown cult. This cult, originally called The Process, and later the Process Church of the Final Judgement, was why I...
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The Fear of Death - mindsets that might help.
I don't mean the natural (biologically-wired) drive to avoid death. Neither do I mean fears about the nature of our individual exits. I mean the sort of out-of-balance existential terror that some...
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Mindfulness and depression: Anthony's wisdom and courage
If you hover your cursor over the title above, it will take you to a blog post that is a bulletin from the front line of using mindfulness to help with clinical depression.Anthony's honesty and...
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They shall not grow old" - the British Legion is mis-using these words.
This excerpt form Lawrence Binyon's poem "For the Fallen" is frequently used at the funerals of soldiers, and at memorial ceremonies for them such as Armistice Day:They shall not grow old, as we that...
View ArticleGET RID of us professional funeralists.
If you let your cursor hover flirtatiously over the title above, it will take you to a BBC website article about printed houses, for people to live in on Mars and the moon (uhuh. Why? What's the point?...
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Denial vs consolation, depression vs mourning, funeral poems
Edward Hirsch lost his son Gabriel in 2011, and recently published a long eponymous poem about Gabriel's life and his death. In the interview I mentioned in my previous post, he says:“I think ancient...
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