On being beside the seaside.

  You have always considered that Turner’s paintings of the sea are often a bit on the beige side.
You are aware, of course, that water is not necessarily blue in the same way that holiday brochures of Caribbean islands, children’s paintings and remote mountain tarns would have us believe. Nevertheless, you always assumed that the correct [...]

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On women’s work.

Yesterday you indulged your cultural heritage as a middle class British woman from the Home Counties by standing in a drafty village hall surrounded by thatched cottages, 17th Centrury pubs and rolling farmland, serving polystyrene cup after polystyrene cup of stewed tea for seven and a half hours.
Even better was the fact that the tea pot was [...]

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On thoughtfulness.

You’ve been honoured by both Charlotte and Aphra Behn now for the Thinking Blogger award meme started here. Ordinarily, your instinct would be to say something self depreciating and belittle the compliment. Unfortunately these are two women who you respect and admire quite a lot, so instead you’ve decided that to hell with that for a game [...]

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On faking it.

The bass tutor for the rather better orchestra you played in used to tell a story about a particularly dull piece he endured once. Well, it may not have been particularly dull for the audience, but it was spectacularly so for the bass section as the part entirely consisted of pinging a pizzicatod note, counting nine, and then doing [...]

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On falling scales.

So you decided you’d better do something towards researching current conditions for armed forces veterans as a result of the ’support the troops’ project described here.
And there you are doing the absolute minimum by rootling around the Ministry of Defence website, when you discover that there is, in fact, a Veterans’ Day. And there has been [...]

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On the creative urge.

You have just finished a marathon cooking session.
So far today you have made a banana and walnut cake with added sultanas so B would eat it. You burnt it, but it’s quite nice now you’ve cut the edges off. Still, it is rather superfluous to need since you have 1001 chocolates in the house if you [...]

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On Women’s Day.

Today, ladies, it is International Women’s Day, a phrase with all the semantic meaning of the Americans’ World Baseball Series. It’s big in the Former Soviet Union though.
You are rather fond of it as it means flowers and a card without either having to get up early and make pancakes or go to the effort of producing [...]

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On leaflets.

February was rather an unpleasant month. You have decided to blame NHS leaflets for this. With which you have become intimately acquainted after spending rather too much of 2005/6 in hospitals or being prodded by your GP for tests.
To be fair, you can see the point of them.
There you are, reeling in shock after being [...]

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On supporting the troops.

A chap called Hobgoblin, who you came to via Charlotte and Aphra Behn’s postings on the topic, has requested movingly and persuasively that people blog about what it means to support the troops. This seems like an admirable project, even if it didn’t run headlong into your latest train of thought, so here goes.
It’s not something you feel you [...]

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On humanity.

So there you are about to recommend a book in a thread as a result of Midnight Jester’s very thoughtful and sensible post on the nature of responsibility in war. Suddenly you realise that you have done this so frequently over the last few years that rather than wear out the keyboard and encourage people to read it one at [...]

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