Life
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Moving With the Times
I have been turning my thoughts back to a few of the literary and philosophical works I read as a youth, having recently been reminded of my pleasure in reading Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in my early teens. This is one of those titles a deep reader can pick up time and time again, and always find something new to consider, some aspect that had escaped them during an earlier reading, some relevance to today. This is also one of those works which almost failed to come into being, until a publisher, without anticipating any real commercial value or financial gain, finally brought it…
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A Most Respectable Lifestyle
I suspect it depends a great deal on a person’s interpretation of Respectable, and whether it can be accepted for many different ways of life, or just from those in certain professions, and the former landed gentry but, as a child, it was a lifestyle which appealed to me. The fault is undoubtedly that of my grandmother – mother’s side – who talked of the old ways of the professional tramp, and the morals and standards some of them lived up to. How they traversed the country, seeking odd jobs and short-term employment in return for sustenance and a quarter to rest in, before moving on to new areas; unbound,…
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Dinosaur: Your Time Has Long Gone
I’ve never considered myself to be old, at least, not until the doctors starting telling me I really needed to lie down on the operating table and have a few things done to keep the old pump beating. And, to a certain extent, I still do not consider myself to be old despite what others might claim: I have been referred to as Grandpa, and the Old Man by various people, although I have tried to appear as if they couldn’t have been referring to me, and simply gone on my way. When it comes to technology, though, and the advances in computers and telecommunications, well, let me tell you…
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A Place For Everything
I am fairly sure that most people, perhaps more likely the older, but younger may have been subjected to this too, know the phrase: ” A Place for Everything, and Everything in its Place.” I heard it constantly uttered as a child, but always from my grandparents, never anyone else. Perhaps it is a thing which springs over a generation now and then, as those on the receiving end vow never to repeat what they have experienced in their youth, and bring their children up differently, or perhaps it is just me. Regardless of which, as I get inevitably older, it is a sentence I have begun using to myself…
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Fielding the Three Big Questions
There is a certain attraction to traditions, especially when visiting foreign lands, which draws tourists and others into a spiral of mixed feelings. On the one hand, it is good to see that the old ways are being respected and upheld. On the other the question of why people cannot simply let go, especially when it comes to traditions filled with outdated pomp and circumstance, costing the taxpayer a fortune without bringing them any benefits. Just as not everything which is new is good and worth pursuing, so it is with the old; there comes a time when traditions need to be consigned to the history books, taught in classes,…
