If, in the course of this writing, I find myself drifting into reflections about Africa, or India, or anywhere else, that play on some notions of a special or mystical quality in their peoples, I rebuke myself, delete and start again. I am to celebrate Thisness not Otherness, in all I have seen and been through, the Inotic not the Exotic, how much the Same everybody and everything is, not how Different. The Odyssey may be a journey sometimes through the strange, the mysterious – but never the unknowable; then out the other side, towards the holy grail of discovery: how familiar everyone and everything is; how densely, intricately, elegantly, contracdictorily, multifacetedly, everybody is like everybody else. That will be the arrival of my journey. NOW WE ARE SIX… ...ty something Now, as the new millennium moves on, we two are well into our Sixties, Eve and I – Dad Mum, Granny Grandpa – starting to feel settled in this lovely place. In this high beam-roofed, tile-floored, galleried hous
Left wing commentary from the heart and the head