For a long while I assumed that I was a laggardly reader in my early years, but I am no longer sure this is true. Certainly my parents helped teach me to read and kept me supplied with reading matter, mostly through attendance at Worthing library in the parsimonious1950s. I was familiar with Enid… Read More »
I have no musical pedigree, or ability. I have experienced this ‘lack’ the more so since moving to the village of Mickleham, which seems to have more than its fair share of talent. Stand-out musicians include Clare Kennington, a superb soloist on the violin, and sister Georgie, whose jazz singing I have enthusiastically blogged about… Read More »
In this fourth blog on Archer’s work on reflexivity I posit an ideal type of the vulnerable fractured reflexive. While the focused autonomous reflexive and the dedicated meta-reflexive characterize significant players around the contestable nature, ownership and use and abuse of wealth and power, the vulnerable fractured reflexive is more accurately portrayed as a non-player.… Read More »
In this third blog in the series I offer a characterisation of another key set of players in the substantive area of health inequalities, those who stand up against or resist the ‘greedy bastards’. The greedy bastards here comprise a cabal at the core of the capitalist executive class (CCE) supported by the state’s… Read More »
Since the quadrupling of oil prices in the early 1970s we have witnessed a change in the class/command dynamic; namely, an intensification of class power relative to that of the increasingly privatised yet regulatory state. In recognition of this I formulated my deliberately provocative greedy bastards hypothesis (GBH), an hypothesis many will find even less… Read More »
The ends of sociability through my secondary schooldays were met largely via ecclesiastical means. There was a moment of religiosity too, an embarrassment now, but an interval to which I return below. It was in my early teens that I first visited St George’s Church in, appositely, St George’s Road, East Worthing. The trigger was… Read More »
This is a longer blog than is usual for me, for which apologies. It is the first of a projected series of four or five. They will examine the writings of Margaret Archer on reflexivity. In this one I set out the basics of her argument and in subsequent ones seek to apply it in… Read More »
We always managed a summer holiday during the six-week school breaks. Options were limited in the absence of surplus income and cheap flights, but we had always had a car. Initially, two black Jowetts, kept on the road by piecemeal engineering: I recall my father’s tie resuscitating the fan belt on one, and the strategic… Read More »
The phrase ‘café society’, the title of a book in press, has for me always pointed to a form of bounded sociability. It is a classic example of what Oldenburg calls a ‘third place’. Revisiting C Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, however, I discovered an alternative and quite different meaning. In the course of his… Read More »
It was the radio that entertained and diverted us in my early years. I overheard Grace Archer expire in the Archers. Wilfred Pickles’ Have a go’ was routine fare, a jar of homemade honey a likely prize for champion competitors. Later, Round the Horne was a favourite during Sunday lunches (followed by the unimaginably tedious… Read More »