Procrastination: because to live is to loaf.
First: If you come up with an innovation that creates value, that value is multiplied a million-fold because now you can share it outside your village. Second: If you build a community, the network effect creates increasing amounts of value as more people use it. And the pothole: As we race to create value, it’s easy to forget that it’s unevenly distributed. A safety net isn’t perfect, but it’s better than no net at all.…
Lock Down 3.0 is really starting to bite. I miss my friends and I miss my family – but the back drop to meeting these groups of people (extended family and others) is the Boozer. I really, really miss the Boozer. Why? Well it is not for the selection of beers – I have the nation’s breweries poised at the click of a mouse, ready to send me a selection of cans. Granted, there is…
Me and the good lady wife, Kathryn, went to see the film T2 Trainspotting at the Everyman in Harrogate. Quite an occasion actually. It is the first time we have visited that cinema since it opened last year – what a cinema. All shiny and new. It pains me to say this, but it wins over the Odeon, where I used to work. The thing the Odeon has going for it is it’s faded grandeur.…
That was that – Kathryn is tucked up in front of the telly & I am about to head to bed. I thought about writing a homily to 2016 – a turbulent year that, warts and all, shaped me and my life – for the better or worse it is yet to be seen. I lost family members but my music career started to take off …. swings and roundabouts really. So, instead of writing…
Well, that was that! A lot of blogs do the whole retrospective sweep around Xmas – I prefer to do that on New Year. So, I will, in this post, just write about what happened today: Christmas Day 2016. Things got off to an excited start. Like a cotton headed ninnymuggins, I woke up at 03:30 and wanted presents. I tried, valiantly, to raise my wife from slumber. I did the gentlemanly thing and wait…
So, what happened at the weekend? Quite a bit as it happens – I did not sleep so that meant there was a lot of w/e overtime put in. I managed to re-haul my web design site www.treebark.design and I am quite please with how it looks. I have gone for a set-up that makes it easier to read and therefore slightly better optimised for search engines. It still has HTTPS (an SSL Certificate) so…
Went to a party n ting. The occasion was the return of the town’s heroes, Andy & Tracey. I was lucky enough to have been invited as part of a small crowd to welcome them home. Andy & Tracey had practically knackered themselves on the 4001 cycle ride across the USA but it was good to see them. They had both lost a lot of weight and were busy planning the next adventure! A testimony…
I have the good fortune to be in the VIBE Collective. We hold a residency every second and last Saturday night of the calendar month at a local venue, RETRO Bar. I will embed our Facebook feed at the bottom of this post for you to get more information about what we get up to. Last night, the 31st of October, was a VIBE event – it was a bit of a quiet one but…
Did you know there was an old, disused Underground Railway in my hometown, Harrogate? The tunnel was abandoned 150 years ago and the far end near Leeds road became an air raid shelter during the war years. George Hudson and the York and North Midland railway completed the line from Church Fenton in 1848. When it reached the site of what is now Harrogate’s Hornbeam Park station, it veered left and then plunged under the 400…
Virtue Theory – or Aristotalianism – identifies right actions as those that a virtuous agent would do, when acting in character. We know what the traditional virtues are – such as courage, moderation, justice etc. – but ‘virtue theory’ identifies the virtues as those character traits that contribute to eudaimonia. ‘Eudaimonia’ is often understood as ‘flourishing’. Morality bites because of its contribution to our flourishing. We all want to flourish. What is the best way,…
The Tao of Pooh is a book written by Benjamin Hoff. The book is intended as an introduction to the Eastern belief system of Taoism for Westerners. It allegorically employs the fictional characters of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories to explain the basic principles of philosophical Taoism. Hoff later wrote The Te of Piglet, a companion book. Hoff wrote the book at night and on weekends while working as a tree pruner in the Portland…
Enforced idleness is a rare treat. Those brief moments in life when for one reason or another you are forced to just stop and think. In waiting rooms, queuing, for example, or even just sitting on a train. Waiting for the tea to brew is one such moment. It doesn’t offer enough time to ‘do’ anything else and you just have to sit and wait, salivating at the prospect of your golden brew. If you…
Things here have recently taken a dip – my health – the support I have received from my wife has been awesome; thank you Kathryn. A great healer to me is the music of Xenis Emputae Travelling Band. I have tried to mimic their style here with a track called Elm; what do you think? I wrote down the notation first (first time I tried this) and then layer it using a Bass recorder, Soprano recorder and…