Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

So you have "lived deep" and extracted all the sweetness out of life, and you have had your last meal . But, what food and drink would you like people to remember you by? What wafting smell would have the power to conjure you up from the grave, to draw you back down through the portals of heaven, to tempt you back onto this lovely balls-up of a planet? Were you the Queen of buttered, slightly crisp and salty asparagus? Were you the King of French Cognac? Were you the Polish Prince of English wild forest mushrooms? Were you enslaved to Arabica? Were you an advocate for English cheese? Did you murder for a drink? Were you an innocent victim of chocolate? And, did you see the world in a grain of rice and eternity in a glowing coal of truffle? On All Hallows, on November 2, in an act meant to both evoke and invoke the dead, Mexicans put up altars and lay out the favourite food and drink of those that they loved, respected or just plain put up with. Traditionally, Mexicans are bot

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