This World, This Life

Norman Davies – “Beneath Another Sky: A Global Journey Into History.” Professor Davies is a Bolton-born historian of Welsh ancestry – and proud of it. A specialist in Eastern European history, in particular that of Poland (where he spends much time, having taken citizenship in 2014, and has a home in Krakow), he is without a doubt my favourite historian. His books are always entertaining, packed with detail that really gets under the skin of his subject matter. Davies doesn’t merely record a dull succession of historical facts, characters, events and dates, although they are all there. They are supported by a wealth of anecdotes, fragments of poetry and song from the period and country in question, documents, detailed maps and illustrations that bring his subject to life. His writing is clear and, considering that his topic can be complex and a bit dry, hugely entertaining. I’ve read several of his books, and never failed to enjoy them immensely and learn from t

A while back (November last, to be precise) I posted a piece on my old Blog ( The World According to Travellin' Bob - http://travellin-bob.blogspot.com) in which I compared experiences on the main browsers out there.  I came down in favour of Chrome, closely followed by Edge with Firefox a close third.  In the time since then, I've continued to shuttle back and forth between them, but for me there has been very little in it.  But in the last week my views have crystallised.  Here is why. Truth be told, as I wrote previously, all three of them are decent browsers for the average Joe Public, non-techie user.  They are all easy enough to set up, they all can run quite happily with multipe tabs open, they all offer security and privacy tools, password management and ad-blockers.  Pages load fast enough, they're all stable......basically if you just want to use them to browse the internet, manage e-mails, watch the odd YouTube video and listen to internet radio stations th

Afternoon all. First up, many thanks to you folks who have had a look at the Blog.  It's most appreciated and the numbers to date are encouraging.  As indeed are the Comments that you have posted thus far - not many, but they are all read with thanks.  I'm not aiming at a Pullitzer Prize or Blog of the Year Award - nice as both would be: this work-in-progress is my hobby, something to fill my happy retirement days, keep my brain working something like normally (at least for me) and if I manage to bring some enjoyment, no matter how small, to someone somewhere then so much the better.  It will have been worthwhile. But I can do better, write stuff that YOU want to read - I want This World, This Life to be as much yours, the readers', as mine, the writer's.  Right now, I'm filling it with stuff that I think might be interesting but it's of course a bit hit and miss - my thoughts are bound to be different to yours.  I will of course carry on doing that,

Well, well, well.  This Coronavirus outbreak is a bit of a bugger.  Coming out of nowhere - or at least China (unless you subscribe to the conspiracy theories about it being planted there by the CIA, with or without the assistance of aliens and/or the Lizard People and/or the Illuminati (delete as you like) - it's playing havoc with Living on Planet Earth.  All joking to one side, the numbers of infections and deaths are truly horrific, and the chaos being caused to businesses and sports and especially people's lives by the very necessary safety measures being put in place by governments everywhere are likely to change the way we all live for years to come.  It's still way too early to have any real idea how long this crisis is likely to last, and equally impossible to really make any meaningful predictions about what fallout actually will come about.  I'm not even going to try! But there are some things we do know. Despite what very many people are saying, it

Back in the early 70s, one-hit-wonder Jon Miles sang about Music  - an overblown three or four part song that in some respects was a poor man's Bohemian Rhapsody .  It started:                                               Music was first love and it will be my last,                                              Music of the future and music of the past. I can understand that: music has been (and continues to be) an important part of my life too.  Calling it my first and last loves is a bit strong, but still - I do love a good tune. Before downloads, we listened to music on CDs.  Before that it was cassettes and 8-track tapes, or maybe reel-to-reel tapes (if we were really flash).  Before that vinyl, 8" singles or 12" albums.  If I wanted to go back further there were acrylic discs, the same size as albums but with only one track per side rather than several, and playing at a different speed, and further back still acrylic cylinders - but both those formats pr

If COVID-19 is doing one thing (that's apart from scaring the crap out of most of the world and showing even more evidence that Mr. Trump is simply unfit to be POTUS) it is to change the way we do things. Some of the changes may be relatively small.  Will we still be using an elbow bump greeting in a years' time or go back to the old favourites of shaking hands and hugging or kissing cheeks (a la Francais or Polski)?  What about thoroughly washing our hands with soap and hot water while singing "Happy Birthday to you" in its entirety twice as a timer, multiple times a day, whether after a toilet visit or not?  I doubt it.  Emptying supermarket shelves of toilet rolls in a mass panic buy?  I bloody hope not! But other changes may turn out to be more fundamental.  Take "Working from home".  It's been around for a few years now, notably in the tech and consultancy industries, where the tools needed (a decent laptop and internet connection and top

Much as I'm concerned about the COVID-19 outbreak, all this global panic seems a bit of an over-reaction to me.  I know, I know -  over a hundred thousand cases is a lot.  I know the number of deaths (currently just over 4000) seems a lot as well (as a percentage, it's 6% of all closed cases).  But taken across a global population in excess of 8 billion......well, it looks small beer really.  Many more people die from ordinary flu every year. Many many more people die from accidents every day.  Conflicts like those in Syria and Yemen, the migrant crises in Europe the Far East and, arguably, the US-Mexican border are just as fatal. And yet - with COVID the world is in a state of panic.  Entire countries are in lockdown (Italy for instance).  Stock markets around the world are plummetting, in free-fall, worse than anything since the global financial crisis in 2008, and show no sign of slowing up their losses.  Airlines are going bust (flyBE), cutting flights and grounding

Agile. Prince 2. Waterfall. Scrum. Sprint. KPIs. PRLs. FRDs. POCs. Huddles….. Dear God. Sometimes I hanker for the old days, when managing (and participating) in various work related projects was largely a matter of common sense and hard work, and not remembering a dictionary-full of buzzwords and acronyms and holding daily meetings to discuss identical things. Back then, in the days of my youth – the 80s and 90s mainly – , when I got involved in a project at work it was because my partners or managers wanted me to do something very specific. They gave me a clear set of instructions, told me by when they needed to be completed and why and made it clear that my career may be damaged if I didn’t do it successfully, then showed me their office door and told me to get on with it. So I did. I don’t remember any failures on my part, and generally speaking the piece of work I guess formed a small component of a much bigger project of which I was (usually) blissfully unaware. It

I’ve been an avid reader (and hobby writer) for as long as I can remember. Give me a comfortable seat (whether in the lounge at home, on a plane train or bus, or in a pub or coffee bar), a bit of music in the background and a good book and I will be a happy man. Let me share with you a few memories and recommendations from my life in literature: The first book I read was probably one of those cloth ones with pictures of apples and balls and cars and stuff that a baby can chew on when fed up with trying to figure out what all that printed coloured stuff really is (so after about 5 seconds). The first one that actually meant anything (though I don’t directly remember it) was almost certainly the classic Ladybird “Janet and John” - I got through the whole series I think, as it was pretty much obligatory when I was at infant’s school in the late 1950s. The first book I remember reading – also at school, but a little later – was again a mandatory children’s classic, and

Back in the 1980s, comedian Paul Whitehouse created a terrific character for The Fast Show on BBC television. Called Ron Manager, the character was apparently based on a famous old post-war football manager called Alec Stock, who was appearing as a pundit on a football match broadcast. He would be asked a question, and with a big smile he would burble on for a while, misty eyed, about how things were back in the day, invariably bringing in phrases like "lovely boys they were", and "kids playing on bomb sites with jumpers for goalposts", before trailing off into silence for a moment, then asking "What was the question?" It was a lovely pastiche, and for those of us of a certain age who had played the game precisely like that (except in fields not bombsites) it rang true. The point was simply that as far as football is concerned, the Old Days were the Best Days, when life itself was much simpler, especially for kids. It was true then and in my v