Ashes to ashes indeed. It is of course not entirely true to say we enter the world as a blank slate: we owe our parents a certain genetic inheritance, plus we find ourselves in a world which is none of our choosing. Nor do we leave it with nothing outstanding. I’m satisfied that my life… Read More »
When I attended the celebration of Mike Bury’s career and writings last Thursday (3/9/26), there was much discussion of the concept of ‘frailty’. Dictionary definitions refer to physical weakness or a loss of bodily resilience that makes a person vulnerable to sudden health declines from minor stresses. It is of course associated most readily with… Read More »
I’m reading a book on the working habits and outputs of the lately deceased David Hockney. I’m not a great fan of his paintings to be honest, although I can see his talent through his drawings. What interested me was his capacity to lose himself in his art, hour after hour day after day. A… Read More »
Even in my 20s I enjoyed writing books. I was not really into articles. I was as content to publish novel data and ideas in books and chapters as to submit them to journals. And this even though I was always employed in medical schools where only articles – and in high impact journals at… Read More »
I have a hypothesis that may on a first reading seem obvious, even trite. Or it may indeed seem faulty. It is that we can only properly grasp what it is to be any age if we are living through it. But this escapes us through the early and middle of the life-course because our… Read More »
I recall being taken off guard when a well-known and widely respected sociologist entering the third age seemed to be constantly fishing for compliments. I had considerable respect for him both personally and for his very real accomplishments within the discipline. But I quietly wished he’d desist. I didn’t want him to somehow diminish his… Read More »
I have just read Graham Greene’s final volume, comprising a selection of dreams culled from a ‘dream diary’ he wrote for many years. He contrasts events in the real world with those in his dream world. I suspect, having been psychoanalysed when younger, he attributed more significance to the contents of his dreams that this… Read More »
I recently posted a photo of myself on Twitter/X with the caption, ’on my way to the pro-Palestinian protest in London’. Unusually for me, it solicited quite some attention, with 7.6 thousand likes and 1.2 thousand retweets. It also provoked a considerable number of responses (which I didn’t bother to count). Many of these were… Read More »
I have increased my rate of reading since retirement. I now read a couple a week on average. For anyone with nothing better to do, here’s my reading over the last seven years. 2017 Dexter: Ted Dexter declares Simenon: Maigret, Longnon and the gangsters Talbot & Weaver: Flight of the martlets Rutherford: Unexpected Simenon: Maigret… Read More »
I have over time reached the conclusion that as a teacher I communicate best with undergraduates, and that as a writer I communicate best with academic colleagues. I rarely teach now, but I have continued to write a decade or more into retirement. Recently a colleague has quite rightly raised the issue of why we… Read More »