This World, This Life

  As ever, my Christmas presents included a couple of books, and I bought more on my trip to London over the New Year.  And, as ever, the choices are eclectic, not limited to a single genre - the perils of a butteffly mind, probably, flitting from one topic to another with no rhyme or reason.  A glance at my unread pile (built up over the past year or so) reveals it includes a Nevile Shute classic ( A Town like Alice) ;   three Orwells in a collection of all his long fiction that I bought years ago but haven't got around to finishing yet;  Moby Dick; David Copperfield;  a history book about the break up of Eastern Europe, how and why it came about and its aftermath; and a thousand-odd pages of Olga Tokarczuk's epic  The Books of Jacob (again, bought a year ago but still not started). So plenty to keep me going for the rest of this year, I think - and my Three Reads in a Month achieved  in January - the first time for years I've managed that! - unl...

  So here we are.  New year, new goals, as I've written elsewhere.  And it's started pretty well. all things considered.  Spending the New Year break flat and cat sitting in London for my son helped: the solitude (not to mention a week indoors with a streaming cold) meant I could crack on and try to write something and read more than I usually can at home surrounded by kids and animals and other distractions. -------------------------------------------------------------- The writing was easier than it has been for a while, and led to a rage against social media in general and Facebook in particular that perhaps went on a bit too long (but what the hell - I was happy with it and it made the points I wanted to make) and a travelogue about the area of  London I was staying in.  Both went live on my blogs during January, together with a 2024 review/2025 plan that I wrote and published at the end of December. Very different subjects....  I had a comment fro...

  I've written before about social media not being all it's cracked up to be, and definitely not the panacaea to all ills that its devoted fanboys and practitioners insist it is.  For a year or two I've been vacillating back and forth between staying put and dumping it from my life - and I still am.  But I think crunch time is almost upon me to make a final call.  It's all to do with how people, the ones that run this stuff and in so doing generate obscene profits for themselves (and presumably less obscene profits for the minions who work for them) are behaving.   I'm talking about you, Elon.  And you, Zuck. I accept platforms like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter - sorry, I will not call it by its ridiculous single letter re-brand - and their various competitors serve a useful purpose to a lot of people, me included.  To re-iterate, I am an ex-pat, and increasingly rarely get the chance to go back to my homeland, so Facebook is a fast and effe...