Category: Life
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Cycling: I cannot know your context
It is cold. I have just decided to carry on, trying to ignore the tightness in my chest, and the retching tickle at the back of my throat that says one thing: “Cough!” My ears are already tingling. “We are the Hellequin,” I pick up the dialogue from a new audiobook. It had faded as…
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How do you begin a piece like this?
Does it start with: “It is time to move on…”? Should I begin biographically, and tell a story, ending with: “and now, I’m on to something new,”? When I met Talis towards the end of 2007, I knew very little about the web, but suffered from a problem of perspective and believed I knew quite…
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Spite and Malice
“She’ll sit on you!” my mother said as I tried to play when I should have been quiet. “Huh? Why will she sit on me?” i asked, confused. “Because that’s what Gi-gi does. She’ll sit on you if you’re bad!” she said ever so seriously. Gi-gi, my great-grandmother was out in Colorado to visit along…
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Some lessons learned from injury
“You’ve had an accident on your bike,” a familiar voice gave me something I knew. “You’re in the hospital,” and the familiarity fled with being awake. A few more dreams, and I slowly recognised myself lying in bed, surrounded by scrubs and unfortunate people. I pushed myself upright, and oddly felt the mattress move beyond…
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American perspective
Friends very often ask whether I feel myself to be American or whether I’m English yet; and I find I always stammer a bit, and hedge. Do I feel like an American? I don’t know. I spent the first 18 years of my life in Colorado, so you could say I’m definitely American. But it…
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A Few Desert Images
Here are a few shots taken from around the place I grew up in Colorado. It’s been a long time since I lived here, but I have never forgotten just how arid and stark it can be. There is a beauty here, but it’s a harsh, unrelenting beauty. The plants are tortured and frail or…
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Shropshire Photos
For the past few months, I’ve been a member of the Shropshire Community flickr group, where a bunch of friendly photo-folk share pics and tips via the excellent networking features on flickr. Saturday, I was privileged to join them for the first time in person as twenty or so of us took a photo-romp around…
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What is your view on psychics who claim to be able to relay messages from dead relatives?
I don’t believe in it. I don’t know what I think about the afterlife entirely—it’s not something I feel I can know; but everything I have experienced, read and encountered leads me to believe that it’s the end of (at least) communication. I don’t believe mediums can communicate with the dead, nor that they can…
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what is the point of decaff?
Clearly, the point, is for people who are negatively affected by caffeine to be able to enjoy the taste of coffee or tea. Decaffeination leaches much of the flavour from tea or coffee, though, leaving it tasting washed out and watery. Decaff tea, to me, tastes papery and flat. Decaff coffee loses many of the…
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Is there something that US have and the UK should have/do it too?
I’m not entirely sure I understand the question. It’s pretty broad. I think the US has things that make it what it is, some of them good, many poor; but a direct one-for-one swap would not—from my perspective—necessarily bring the benefits they might have in the US. There is, for example, a culture of respect…