Continued from Books I Read in 2025 Part 1 Fenner Brockway, Towards Tomorrow To return to the High Wycombe theme from the Martin O'Neill book outlined in part 1, I met Fenner Brockway in December 1982. When I say 'met', we both spoke at a demonstration, him aged 94, me a long-haired 18-year-old. I was a member of a...

Spies, detectives, and terrorists; westerns and Native American life; war and violence; gangs and prisoners; animals and humans; rebels and resistance; women and feminism; autobiography and memoir; racism and sectarianism; music and pop stars; football and footballers. Ernest Hemingway, Men without Women I think...

Communism and leftists; change and alternatives; colonialism and development; spies and terrorists; psychoanalysis and grief; crime and heroes; climate and sustainability; poverty and survival; football and footballers. 2021? I've been putting together a blog post on books I read in 2025. It prompted me to delve...

I haven’t written anything in four months. This period of prolonged silence is best explained by the unexpected difficulties of the business that I started in 2024, on the assumption that it must be possible to make an ethical, human-centered business on the basis of how incompetent the general market seemed. In...

The 9th post of My Top Tracks I was depressed as a teenager. Who wasn't? There were probably some hormones going around. But for me it was mainly about society and circumstances. I lived in a suburban-feeling small town where most people seemed most concerned about having a neatly clipped lawn and a spotless clean...

This is the 8th post on My Top 100 Tracks I had an oud. It's a Middle-Eastern lute-like instrument. Roundabout 2000 or so I was given one as a gift. There are various types and mine was an Arabic oud from Egypt. I meant to learn how to play it. I can play the guitar at a very basic level, so thought that would help...

This is the seventh post of My Top 100 Tracks When Patti Smith has come up in conversations in the past and people have said 'Oh, yeah, Because the Night, I love that song', I've always felt superior and sneery. It's her most commercially successful song, but she wrote lots of other great ones, less poppy and...

The sixth post of My Top 100 Tracks I swim 3 times a week. It's about the only physical or sporting activity I'm any good at. I had lessons through my childhood so know roughly what you're supposed to do. Because of a bad back, swimming is the best form of exercise for me and, due to hypertension, the doctor says I...

A few days ago, I was presented with an article titled “My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts” by Thomas Ptacek. I thought it was not very good, and didn't give it a second thought. To quote the formidable Baldur Bjarnason: “I don’t recommend reading it, but you can if you want. It is full of half-baked ideas and...

Note: This is an edited re-post of something I wrote in 2019 on a now-defunct blog, apparently a month before I started my first job in tech. I need to reference it in a future post. As a result, it is a little bit different stylistically from my current writing. I hope you enjoy it anyway! I'm talking about the...

I first went to see Reading play football in the 1972-3 season aged just 8. They were in the 4th division, now League 2. We lived in Tilehurst in Reading and my dad took me and my brother to home matches. Sometimes my mum came too which was unusual. There weren't many women at the games let alone much in the way of...

Here is what Ina wrote about her Auntie Edie who she stayed with in summers in Newburgh in her childhood. There is a bit of overlap with what she wrote elsewhere about Uncle George and Newburgh, but also new things. Edith Mark‘s father was from Yorkshire, her mother from Ireland. She had a brother, Leslie, who lived...