I am writing this at 4.49am, having been awake since 3.11am following about 3 hours of sleep. You may think this disqualifies me from having any wisdom about dealing with insomnia. But this has been an exception – and I blame it entirely on the course of steroids I have just started. The last ten…
Taking a Moment
Was it the blurry vision that caused my watery eye? Or the side effects of all those drugs that briefly made me cry? Or maybe just the crazy choice to drink the whole month dry? Was it that late-night movie? Or was the reason why – A damaged flower, a life cut short, that everything must…
A visit to Auschwitz
Originally posted on Unwrapping The World:
My thoughts on the trip Hannah and I made to Auschwitz and Birkenau in 2009. We arrived by bus from Krakow. It was a bright sunny day – one felt it would have been more appropriate to arrive in the cold and snow. We walked into the the museum,…
Football, ethics and my team’s attempt to sign Ched Evans
And so the sordid Ched Evans debacle is finally resolved. Since his despicable rape of a woman in 2011, the whole sorry saga has lurched from one scandal to another. Until we have Steve Bruce questioning the veracity of a rape conviction and Gordon Taylor commenting on miscarriages of justice with insensitive comparisons to the…
The end of the Christmas Twilight Zone
We are finally escaping the annual twilight zone between Christmas and New Year – those unnerving and unsettling 10 days when we are not quite sure where we are, what day it is, and what exactly we are meant to be doing. Are we to celebrate, relax, work or to make full and productive use of…
You say you want a Resolution?
We appear to be programmed with insatiable ambition and aspiration. We want to achieve – tick things off, get things done. Life without goals would be aimless and therefore, surely, pointless? We fear drifting from day to day without direction, without making progress. We feel the need to cross things off our bucket list. And…
A little bit of Art in the Heart?
What is art? And what does it do for you? and to you? As we walked through the arty end of Glasgow, along something of a back street, we passed the window of an art studio. We peered inside. We saw a surprisingly large white room containing large bright coloured red cubes arranged across the…
No more killing fields
Passing through Schipol airport four days after MH17 was blown out of the skies over Ukraine, was always going to be poignant. I am sat on the KLM Cityhopper from Amsterdam to Oslo. I have no thoughts or fears of being attacked. But then, nor did the 298 living and breathing people who left from…
Le Tour de Yorkshire
By ‘eck Bonjour – a Day at Le Tour. When France came to Yorkshire. We had been appreciating our own little tour of a small corner of France, venturing out “à pied” and “en auto” to nearby towns and villages. As we returned today from a little run up a picturesque valley, we found ourselves…
Immersing myself in rural France
Three days into our holiday in France, and following my previous blog, one of my sisters suggested that I get off the internet and immerse myself in the rural French way of life. This got me thinking – what is the French way of life? It is one of those things which we can all…
Unwrapping The World 