Starting running, and supporting Little Stoke Parkrun

I’ve made some very tentative attempts at starting running in the past year or so, but when I saw the news about the local council trying either to extract money from Little Stoke Parkrun (a free event in a public park) or to close it down, I felt I should start running to support the […]

At last, I go to the Taizé meeting in Prague

Soon after I heard of the Taizé movement, I saw a notice about the New Year’s meeting in Prague in 1990. Unfortunately, the local contact was someone in my parish who didn’t like me (OK, I fancied her, and she didn’t fancy me back and didn’t want me to be able to go) and she […]

Exploring some social and political issues

My politics don’t seem to fit neatly into classifications such as “right” or “left”, or indeed “centre”; I tend to think of myself as small-c conservative, but this is probably either an illusion, or just referring to an earlier stage of my development. But my lack of simple scalar political alignment isn’t a matter of […]

What is creepiness?

What is creepiness? We recognize it when we see it (in others, at any rate; creepy people don’t seem to recognize it in themselves, and that ties in with other aspects of creepiness), but it’s less easy to describe quite what it is. In this essay, I’ll be describing what I see as creepiness; others […]

An interesting task for the team

Last week we had a deadline at work, for a release, and now my boss is in the USA for the release conference. He set us a task to do in his absence: attend the beer festival! Since there’s probably a fairly high proportion of geeks attending, he said we could combine it with trying […]

So annoyed I could have had icily polite words with someone

On my way home from work today, as usual I used the large roundabout with traffic lights at Milton Junction. I had stopped for the lights, being the first vehicle in the queue, and as I was starting a car went across in front of me going round the roundabout, not just narrowly proceding on […]

Too mind-numbing for me

I went to the gym after work today, and the mind-numbing crap being played through the loudspeakers was too bad to suppress with actual music through my headphones, so, on an impulse that had been pending for a while, I went to reception and cancelled my subscription from the end of the month. (I now […]

Islands, church trips, and the delay of gratification

Last weekend was a bit of a flop, in many ways. At least that should mean things have more potential to get better! I had been meaning to go to OSSbarcamp, and thought I had booked the hotel for my stay, but it turned out I’d forgotten, and all the ones I could find with […]

Where society went wrong?

There’s a choice our `western’ society (and others) stumbled into making, and I say `stumbled’ into it because I don’t get the impression that it was a fully thought-out choice. We now take it so much for granted that it may be quite shocking to suggest the alternative. The choice (if choice it was) was […]

Who am I? How did I get here? Where do I go next?

Who am I? As my angiogram, with its attendant risks, is only three days away at the time I’m writing this, I’m worrying about the risk of death and of going to hell, or even just the risk of death, and I’ve been reading about the growing body of non-scientific evidence for survival of the […]