There is a Grateful Dead song from the very early days called ‘The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)’. In all honesty, it’s not really a keeper and I suspect that much of its continuing appeal resides in its pretty cool title, plus the fact that it is Track 1, Side 1 of the band’s first…
I got on a bus recently. Let me tell you, my life is one long party. I had a suitcase with me so, wanting to stay close to the luggage rack, I flopped down in the nearest seat, only noticing a couple of minutes later that it was one prioritised for the elderly and infirm. My…
My passport went off for renewal last week. Naturally, the application process entailed getting some new identity photos. Or, as it’s also known, a reality check. Compared to ten years ago I’m rather paler (the Abu Dhabi tan has long faded) and the face fungus is still a comparatively recent addition. Otherwise, not too bad really: a little more…
“Ask a simple question and you’ll get a simple answer” I was always told when I was a child. Sound advice too, I’ve always thought. The posing of a question is one of the most frequently used of all poetic devices and is particularly popular in modern songwriting. The problem is that even if the initial…
Every so often, WordPress comes up with a daily prompt that’s quite irresistible, and a couple of days ago they offered up an absolute beauty. “Your blog is being turned into an audiobook. If you could choose anyone to narrate your posts, who would it be?” This fits in neatly with one of their earlier…
“Far from home. Tell us about the farthest you’ve ever travelled from home.” There’s a website – of course there is: did you really think there wouldn’t be? – that will tell you the precisely opposite position on the globe to wherever you are in the world. Useful to know. Thus it tells me that if, unaccountably, I…
“21st century citizen. Do you belong in this day and age? If you do, explain why – and if you don’t, when in human history would you rather be?” A bit tricky this one, because there’s good and bad today, and there was certainly both good and bad in the old days. In the interests of…
During my first year as a student at the University of Kent, between October 1970 and June 1971, I lived in room E1 S4 of Eliot College. Why ‘E1 S4’? You may well ask. Simple really: it was room number 4 in the south corridor on the first (ground) floor of the east block of the…
“When faced with confrontation do you head for the hills or walk straight in? Was there ever a time you wished you’d had the opposite reaction?” This is only tangentially about confrontation (it’s only a prompt,though, isn’t it?), but today I’m going to tell you about the time I heckled Led Zeppelin. Bet that got your…
“…a magic potion…will make one of your senses…super sharp, but dull the others. Will you sip it and, if so, what sense do you choose?” Happily, most of my senses still function fairly well. Indeed, the only exception is my sight, which ain’t what it used to be, as I now need varifocals to do…
