Category: Life
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20 years ago in Glasgow
More than 20 years ago, Glasgow had more than its fair share of comfortable coffee shops. Several were lodged in bookshops, and one in particular pulls it’s way across time, sliding it’s memory-laden charge along neurones and drops me into an overstuffed chair in a little alcove. I’ve got a small table next to me,…
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We value your memories.
Facebook shows me. Photos of old friends I’ve not seen in a decade, or more. It tells me people who don’t know me from Adam think I should go fund them. It applies a bolt of you know, those hormones that make you start, sweat, and feel like you’re not really here? Like you’re not…
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Pandemic Notes: and our echoed voices come back
A friend posted a link to an article that said something about the disease mess were in right now. This friend has a different friendship network from me. It’s interesting to see what their network thinks and says, so I happened to have a look at the dozen or so comments. Every single comment (at…
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Pandemic Notes: I’m done breaking things down, I need to build them up again.
I’ve been exhorting people to create. To reach out, and make something, in this pandemic – this soul-sucking time that suffocates spirit by cutting off humanity from our lifeline of humans. Creating extends. You reach for tools, for cameras, you stretch before and after you make. You don’t reach to read the news, you haunch,…
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Pandemic Notes: Quarantine introspection. It’ll kill you slowly, if you let it.
Thoughts follow thoughts, and patterns put a spin on them so they tend to go off in familiar directions. Right now, where I’m at, I’m finding it incredibly easy to think about what could have been. It starts quite practically: asking my imagination machine to show me what would have happened if, say, the US…
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Pandemic Notes: Leaders in a time of crisis have a much greater responsibility.
As a kid, I was taught that leadership is a service role. It’s a position that exists to offer support and builds people up to fulfill their potential, and as a whole, move toward a common purpose.
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Pandemic Notes: the shockwaves of future grief are so great, they’re already propagating into my here, now.
So, tonight, I’ve experienced unsettling turbulence as I’ve tried to follow and understand news. First, that bone-deep dread is starting to be called due across both my countries. We’ve been watching this wave for a long time, and it’s arrived. A thousand people have died in New York City [1] (and I was planning to…
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Pandemic Notes: I don’t think America needs to kill that many people.
According to these datasets the NYT published: China had 3,300 deaths from 80k infections, and now has fewer than 100 recent new cases. They suppressed the worst if the infection so far. South Korea had nearly 10,000 cases, around 150 deaths, and around 100 recent new cases. They’ve suppressed the worst of the infection so…
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At least once, those bags contained pretty much everything I owned.
A friend of mine posted a photo: his bags, badly lit by soul-sucking strip lights of airports, train stations, and the night bus. It looks dreadful, and he’s jetlagged to shit, no doubt. He’s knackered, gone through customs, queues, ticketing and had eaten God-knows food instead of normal food. Part of me longs to feel…
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Just type: How I miss Ludlow
How I miss Ludlow. A brace of pheasants in the feather for less than a fiver – hanging from one of Ludlow’s five local butchers. Each dwelling in a building made by medieval tradesmen. Cobblestones, of course, usually damp, with overhanging late-medieval timbers just overhead. If you duck and twist to the market square, you can…