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Merry Christmas
All being well, I’ll be at Midnight Communion when this post goes live. It’s the first I’ve been to in a good number of years. It’s been a stressful time recently, what with one thing and another...
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On lucky breaks
I’ve been somewhat out of things for the last couple of weeks. I took some well-deserved vacation days and generally chilled out (even the presence of 350+ unread emails in my inbox when I got to work...
View ArticleOn treating with respect
It’s all too easy to call someone stupid when they disagree with you. Understandable, but wrong nonetheless. Some of these people, who don’t seem to understand science or reason, may be politically...
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On tits and sparrows
Opposite the advertisement for the Grant Arms Hotel, Grantown-on-Spey (“The Wildlife Hotel”) in Autumn 2011′s Birds magazine from the RSPB, Caroline Nash tells us she’s helping to save sparrows. As you...
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Poppy
It’s not about being patriotic or British—not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with either of those. It’s about those who, when the time came, gave whatever they could for what they believed in....
View ArticleOn writing
I’ve heard it said there’s no such thing as ‘bricklayer’s block’. The argument goes that bricklayers lay bricks, that pilots (say) fly, and that writers write. For those of us lucky enough to be paid...
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On target
I settle, relaxing all my muscles: feet to legs to bum to back to arms. I’m essentially slumped. A bit of pain in my left hand: that’s not quite right. Perhaps I just have to get used to it. I look at...
View ArticleMore to a sinner
When people ask who were my influences, I find it difficult to give a straight answer. I cannot name a childhood hero in whose footsteps I wanted to follow, neither was there someone whose guidance or...
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Parklife
If you’ve ever seen my Flickr stream you might realize I’m quite fond of birds. Even here in Zone 2 there are a lot of birds around—especially in our garden. Blue tits, great tits, long-tailed tits,...
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Joshua fit the battle of Jericho
I am typing this slowly, with one hand. I do of course already have two lovely daughters, but welcoming Joshua—their half-brother—into the world wasn’t any less special. And the original Pawn, Rachel,...
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Guns + ammunition
Just after I started shooting I was listening to a couple of the old(er) timers bitching about their recent poor performance. One of them blamed the ammunition they were using. The other pointed out...
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My iron lung (redux)
The is a modified version of a couple of posts that originally appeared in December 2006 on ‘Life of a lab rat’, my blog at the University of Sydney. Which is now sadly defunct. It’s not what you know,...
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On remembrance
Thirty years ago—plus or minus a week—I visited Berlin for the first time. It was a school trip, organized by our physics teacher. We rode a train from Braunschweig to Helmstedt, where we picked up an...
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On legends
For most of my first 17 years I lived on, or very close to, one of a number of airbases in England and Germany. Just about every day was airshow day, at least for a somewhat limited and specialist...
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Hard Day’s Night
Last year was mental. Back in December 2015, with about about 10 days’ notice, a colleague and I flew to Orlando on a Sunday lunchtime, ran a meeting Monday morning, and flew home Monday night. That...
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Back in the USSR
Last time I was here, I made a comment about how I hoped things were going to get less busy. Yeah… that didn’t work out too well. Since January, I have been on six overseas work trips. The most recent...
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Weather with you
Even before we moved to Gravesend, we knew of its “dodgy thermometer” from the weather forecasts on TV and radio. Gravesend was consistently the warmest place in the country, bucking the nation’s...
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Days
Joshua is at that delightful age when he is yet too young to be able to reliably, unaided, clean and dress himself, yet old enough to resist getting ready to leave the house in the morning. When he...
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