Harris Biden Her Time

Perhaps it is the circles in which I travel, but of late it seemed to me every person who thinks deeply about life had one thing to say about the USA: How is it, in a country of 336 million people, that Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the only candidates for president? * (There’s also a Kennedy offspring, whose name escapes me, who plans to run. Ed) This rhetorical question became academic after President…

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Digressions – The future for independent music

Nothing sums up the brutal futility of the Israel/Gaza war more succinctly than Two Brothers, a folk song by UK songwriter Pete Morton. The lyric imagines a mother, fed up with the squabbling siblings, Israel and Palestine: “I don’t care who started it, just try and get along.” Morton’s song has been criticised as ‘condescending,’ that it trivialises a complex Middle East conflict. But the central message – a call for peace – can’t be…

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People without lists are listless Part II

This week let’s turn to the universal topic of lists and list-making.I instinctively feel that readers are ripe for a light-hearted look at something that’s not about Russia, the threat of nuclear war, the price of fuel or a new Covid strain. I take issue with the medical journal articles that define excessive list-making as an indication of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The fact that I re-wrote these two paragraphs 10 times is no real indication….

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Suicide and the media

Not so long ago suicide was something you rarely read about in the press, due to an informal agreement between the media and the “helping professions” not to overly publicise the how and where aspects of suicide, as it is believed to spark copycat suicides. The advent of online journalism, social media and the 24 hour news cycle has more or less consigned that gentlemen’s agreement to the too-hard basket. The Australian mentioned the word…

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