Mind & body.

I am interested in the idea and practice of spirituality: but it may all be nonsense, and I may be venially corporeal. This category is a bit of a catch-all for posts on subjects ranging from the intellectual (I should be so lucky), to the spiritual (likewise) via the psychological and the creative.

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Peter Millett: A senior judge’s revelations

My knowledge of the legal system is as much from TV as from my occasional apearences before judges in court (twice) and in Parliament (once). I have been a tourist observer of some judges, both civil and criminal, and felt a lot of respect and a batsqueak of anxiety. I have sometimes felt that the less we know about judges as people, the better for justice. And yet I fell on the memoir As in Memory Long (2017) by Lord Justice Peter Millett (1932-2021), with a will. It is deliberately but almost slyly revelatory. It was encountered by chance, but exerted a peculiar spell. Oddly, but above all, Millett was not a celebrity judge. He was not a Woolf, Hoffman, Sumption, Bingham or Lester and I prefer neglected byways to well-trodden highways. Perhaps that’s because I am struck that fame conduces to the performative. A couple of warnings. Peter Millett reveals himself to have had a certain pettiness in his nature. I have not skated over this. And I repeat: I am not equipped to judge him as a judge. Luckily, I have come across Colin Paterson,  an excellent writer who is, and nearly does. Read more...

Published

07 September 2024

Professionals: The vital elites

The publication on 4 September 2024 of the final report into the catastrophic 2017 Grenfell Tower fire highlighted a wider range of issues than any single disaster report before it. It seemed to top-out twenty years' worth of corporate and institutional malfeasance which have brought the "crisis in trust" to the fore. From Enron (2001) to the decades of the Post Office scandal (which arguably added judicial failure to the mix), these debacles gave impetus to the pervasive modern sense that modern public bodies can't be relied on to be decent or frank. Read more...

Published

03 September 2024

Scrap the Welfare State!

In 2007 I wrote a book, Scrap the BBC!, saying that privatising the BBC was a cinch compared to fulfilling the far more important ambition of scrapping the big-state socialist NHS. A decade and a half on, I return in this rather long (<3,500 word) essay  to that tougher theme, and have ramped it up to encompass the even more important ambition to scrap the big state socialist welfare system altogether. That's the work of perhaps 30 years'-worth of Parliaments. It needs to be stated now as the long-term vision of any party which wants Britain to be post-socialist. Backing down from that challenge is an act of daily cowardice.
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Published

25 July 2024

Glasto ’24: Boomers to Gen Z

This started as jottings about Glastonbury 2024, as seen on TV. It has morphed into a rather long account of all sorts of Glastonbury memories, and incorporating other festival moments, but ranging over the way the entire music scene has evolved in my time.

If some of the remarks seem judgmental, you might kindly put it down to the fact that I have been immersed in writing from the 19th and earlyish 20th Century when unfettered waspishlness was last in vogue. 1 Read more...

Published

07 July 2024

Bernardine Bishop: a novelist in her 20s, and 70s

Bernardine Bishop wrote two novels in her 20s, then became a psychotherapist until her 70s, when - forced by cancer - she abandoned her profession, and wrote three last novels. I look here at the first of her late books (published in 2013) and of her early books (published in 2013), both well received on their arrival. (Footnote 1) Read more...

Published

12 April 2024

Spirituality and the Material Universe

It has taken me many years to fret out what I mean by the question: What to do with words like 'spirituality' when applied in a material universe? Now that, at last, I think I have something like answers, the next question is: Can I usefully express myself on the matter? This post will be something of an evolving draft. Here goes.... Read more...

Published

22 November 2023

SKN and Lucie Rie

Excellent and, as usual, tantalising evidence of Stanley North's nature has quite suddenly been put my way. Tanya Harrod, the writer on the history and relationship of the worlds of art and of crafts, wrote asking me for some information about Stanley. Along the way Dr Harrod told me that Lucie Rie, the crucial modernist potter, had formed a strong relationship with Stanley, shortly after her arrival in London and late in his quite short life. Read more...

Published

18 November 2023

Let’s end Totalitarian Liberalism

I want to show something of the workings of the soft-left, green, anti-Tory, 'progressive', Woke ideals which have coalesced to enfeeble so many of the brightest and best adults of our day. They have unconsciously but comprehensively embraced several linked varieties of liberalism (Kindergarten, Smug, Snobbish, and Bossy - even Totalitarian). They have abandoned a liberalism which is tough and self-challenging. I mourn how so many nice, intelligent people have allowed their minds and hearts to be hijacked to the point where they can't see the merit in the Rigorous Liberalism which could make them useful to our polity.

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Published

08 October 2023

Filson Young’s novel of love, lucre and lighthouses

Filson Young was often a passionate being, and quite often, it seemed, a bit buttoned up. He had two marriages and many affairs. He had a very wide acquaintance, literary, military and political. He grew a big reputation very young, not least because of his affiliation with the lively publisher, Grant Richards. Their team-work produced his first novel, Sands of Pleasure in 1905. It concerns a lighthouse and rural society in Cornwall and chandeleers and courtesans in Pairs. Read more...

Published

15 March 2023

Filson Young: BBC pioneer

This is an account of some parts of Shall I Listen? of 1933. It was the penultimate book by Filson Young (1876-1936). He was a BBC pioneer with instincts about the future of broadcasting which foreshadow the podcast age. He was a snob who disparaged Reithian London-centricity. He was a Londoner who invented a new style of outside broadcasting from a Cornish village. Read more...

Published

14 March 2023
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