Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

Eve Hall 1937 – 2007 Eve Hall, beloved wife of Tony, died peacefully at home on 23rd October. Loved and mourned by her sons Phil, Andy and Chris, her grandchildren Natalie, Lucy, John, Myles, Betty, Carmen, Jess, Alice, Eve and Bobby, and her daughters-in-law Tere, Kate and Anne. She will also be deeply missed by all her family and friends. The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed I am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, it flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you neve...

Compassion means you are on-side, that you go out to bat for someone. Pity, on the other hand, is what you may feel for an Iraqi, for a Palestinian in a refugee camp, for a brown skinned Tsunami victim. You can feel pity for a sweatshop worker in China and still buy the clothes. You can feel pity for the Iraqi's as a US grunt and still mow someone down at a check point. Pity is what we offer a Palestinian child shot by an Israeli sniper. Compassion is what we offer an Israeli child blown up by a Palestinian. It is all about point of view, isn't it. It's about being able to manipulate events to set agendas. Bush used the destruction of the Twin Towers like Hitler used the Burning of the Reichstag. Hitler introduced the enabling act and Bush the Patriot act. It's a ploy as old as history. Moore tells us, 15 out of the 19 bombers were Saudis, Saudi money financed the attack on the Towers and a Saudi planned it, but Bush used 9/11 as justification for the invasion of......

Although I have only seen it in flashes between the trees, I have a connection with Sarajevo, It looked beautiful. Past the rocky slopes and cracking pine cones, it shone at me from a valley. You can see my great grandfather Izy on the steps of the town hall in pictures, part of the committee that gave the Archduke Franz Ferdinand his send off. In India, during Indira Gandhi's emergency, long ago now, I met my first girlfriend, a budding Yugoslavian. She had obsidian eyes, fine bronze hair, a smile like the Medusa and stubby fingers. In1976 Yugoslavia seemed like a peaceful place and I romanticised it because I remembered Natasha and I felt I was a socialist and I was only 16. A year later, in summer, we lived together for a month. In 1980. She left her new boyfriend in town and took me to a small Island off the coast. We slept in the forest and swam in a bay surrounded by yellow rocks like. Her friends seemed to have so much time to waste, to get themselves into existential knots....

It's rare that you watch an action movie that makes you laugh out loud at the crux of the action. Watching Jason Bourne hide at the back of the Thresher's off license in Waterloo station was such a moment. And to top it all, in the hot heart of the frenetic action, as Bourne and a Guardian Journalist negotiate W. H. Smiths, placed slap bang in the middle of the Waterloo concourse, the loudspeakers announce that "The train to Chessington South will be leaving from platform 8." "But, hey, that's my train!" The Bourne movies have had quite a good stab at capturing a tiny bit of the spirit of places where they are set. This was important to their success. The Moroccan and Madrid stair wells, a modern German home, all these little touches. But they could have gone a little further, they could have provided little holographic shards or narrative rather than just a bit of reflected shatter. "The train to Chessington South will be leaving from platform 8....

Drew A. Hyland has a point when he argues in 1973 against philosophy as a Hegelian view of history. And he is also right to mark out the importance of the Epic of Gilgamesh. From my perspective of the 21st century I always thought the story was silly. A comic-like story of a sexually ambivilant superhero. What was that thing he had going with Enkidu? All that wrestling in the dust. Enkidu Shams and Gilgamesh Rumi. But Gilgamesh wasn't Superman, he wasn't, as Tarantino suggested in Kill Bill II, a snide critique on the weakness of men or Chabon's Kavalier and Clay fantasizing about saving all our grandparents from the ovens of Treblinka and Aushwitz. Gilgamesh headed straight for the ovens of Ishtar. The figure of Gilgamesh is worthy of being the first human figure in myth. greater. Gilgamesh would fight for humanity's dignity and place in what Pythagoras was to call the kosmos. Gilgamesh, as quoted by Hyland says: "Shamash, listen to me, listen to me Shamash, l...

The language of Tarkovsky is poetic and he expresses himself cinematographically through images of melting ice and trees moving in breezes that swell up unexpectedly. Tarkovsky work is incohate, while barns and candles burn and vast oceans move with sentience. Tarkovsky's landscapes are always sentient. The rhythms of car and train journeys play against the unspoken thoughts of Tarkovsky's characters, which, in turn, still unrevealed, play against the watching cinema audience like Rimbaud's sunlight reflecting off water. Long slow camera shots allow us to dwell in Tarkovsky's iconography and share his sentiment. We feel we may even sense the characters heartbeats and, doing so, our own heartbeat breaks through in synchrony. We watch the candle flicker as the writer shields it from the eddies of air blowing up dry leaves in the empty swimming pool, and we can't help but hear the softly snickering whispers. Who's that? Who's there? Can you hear them too? And t...

The best charity bookshops in London are Oxfam bookshops. The books are well shelved, sorted according to subject area and alphabetically and priced slightly more highly. And the best book section in an Oxfam bookshop, I don't mind sharing this with you, is run by "the book lady" in Twickenham . Her name is Felicity. Felicity must be in her late 80s. She is thin and smiles and wears pince nez . Her diction is slow, and her vowels and consonants are grooved into the the clarity and timbre of the 1940s. She says she is so pleased when she can "match a person with a book." She thinks that "well, most literature is either Dionysian or Apollonian, isn't it." - she says this with another cheering smile. Recently, I bought from her, for 2 pounds, a 150 year old red leather bound volume of Sir. Walter Scott's poetry (Why on Earth did I do that?), A book including two of Thomas Paine's pieces, and three other books: Fraser, The Golden Bough, the ...