Category: Rivers of Life


  • The Foolishness of It All According to Abraham Lincoln, you can fool some of the people all of the time. I think he has a point, as right now I’m feeling pretty foolish, and judging by the assembled masses – since at first glance, there are thousands of us – I’m not alone in such…

  • A Fish-and-Chip Shop Revolution Now, I only nipped in for cod and chips, but now my ears are getting a battering. And I don’t know about you, but whenever I consider hotbeds of sedition and anarchy, I picture Pancho Villa and dusty encampments in Mexican deserts; Che Guevara’s sweaty jungle camp in Bolivia, or Rick’s…

  • The Ceremony Begins You never picture yourself at one of these ceremonies, but if you did, it would be like this. Cold, damp, and overcast. Perfect. As it should be. I always feel that the sun has no place here today; it feels too much like it’s trying to put the fun into funeral. I’d…

  • A Feast of the Imagination Oops, I’ve let my imagination get the better of me. Deep in my subconscious mind, I’m desperately ravaging a Beef Wellington; my ever-sweet tooth eager to tuck into the final course of an imaginary feast and scoff the non-existent Peach Melba that doesn’t await me. Already, I’m regretting the invented…

  • Ode To Lucy

    The dog that was never meant to be,Left quite an impression,One, deep and everlasting,Imprinted upon me.,You were the one we never wanted,And now we can hardly bear to part,For in our loving process,You smashed and broke,This, such a heavy, heart. Bloody dog, I’ll say it again,So many tears, mostly, all in vain,Can I ever feel…

  • By the time this is online, I will have no idea what latest nonsense has spilled from the lips of Donald Trump. All I do know is that it will be sheer and utter tripe—bilge water of the highest degree. Yet it will be deadly, such is his destructive stream of consciousness. Mad as a……

  • The Growing Fear of Social Unrest and DivisionI used to think that it took a lot to scare me; I’m not talking about the anxiety that often afflicts me, but real fear—the kind I’m experiencing right now. It’s the same kind of shiver I felt on election night and the same as I feel now…

  • A Moment of Reflection in Aldershot Military Cemetery Standing solemnly in silent contemplation at the Aldershot Military Cemetery, soaking in the summer sunshine, eternity faces me carved in stone — a reality so far removed from the bravado of war or the romance of its poets that it jolts. The Weight of Memory on a…

  • I was going to write a piece — it was going to be brilliant — then I got distracted, and I forgot what I was going to write. The Drinking Problem You see, I’ve been drinking; it’s been a shit year, a shit week, and a shit day, one made all the worse by an…

  • The Strange Process of Aging Ageing is such a strange process — oddly insidious, it creeps up on you. When I hear on the news that something happened forty years ago, for a second, I think of the Blitz. But of course, that was much further back. Forty years ago was the eighties, not the…