Down With The Kids – Polyhymns’ sound of parenthood and isolation in the digital age is with me in lockdown

I’ve tended to withdraw from social media to a great extent while I’ve been shielding during the lockdown. It was getting a bit too much. It’s no overstatement to say that music has been a real lifeline during the last couple of months, and one track in particular in recent days has done the business. …

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“Earth Emotions – New Words for a New World” by Glenn A. Albrecht

“We’ve followed the science” parrots a politician from a daily press conference podium. Defending themselves against charges of inaction or incompetence, the same politician responds in a monotone voice, from a pre-scripted reply that “we’re straining every sinew”. Words are important, but what is crucial is what they really mean – what is behind them. …

Sourdough September – the Power of Three!

I've written before (click here - Feb. 2019) about my love of 'real bread' and catching the sourdough baking bug. It signposts the recipes I trust most, as well as plenty of other useful links. This month has been designated 'Sourdough September' by the 'Real Bread Campaign', so before the month is through, I wanted …

The Hows and Whys of the Hampshire heaths

With the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Kingsley, I posted recently about his contribution to a sense of 'place' in this corner of North-East Hampshire where I live, which referred to one of his works ("Prose Idylls, New and Old"), and how it described the 'rough commons' terrain of the area. Since that post, …

Kingsley – making it quite a place

I don’t pretend to be a serious historian, but I do take an interest in the identity of my local area.  I was born in Farnham, on the Surrey/Hampshire border, and spent the entire 18 years of childhood growing up in Yateley, in Hampshire – the town to which I returned some four years ago …

Real Bread – is flour, water and salt really poetry, science, history – or politics?

To mark the start of "Real Bread Week" (23rd Feb - 3rd Mar 2019),  I did everything in my power to pass on the 'sourdough bug' to my 10 year old niece Olivia. I'm not sure whether sourdough baking is more poetry or science - looking after the starter culture; autolysing the dough; the rhythms …

Best of 2018

As ever, it has been a tough call pulling together my top tracks of the year, but in what has been a difficult year due to deaths in the family, and against the backdrop of stagnant cesspit of national politics, it has been a usefully therapeutic exercise. I've included links to videos of my twelve …

Psychogeography is killer!

Psychogeography has been emerging as a dimension in my life for a good few years - a way of navigating and making sense of my own personal space, and a paradigm worthy of use interrogating professional, social and cultural evidence and ideas in research. I make these claims (I'd previously even started to try to …

Old Dutch, New Tricks

I decided to launch a new blog when at the tender age of 45 years, I was medically retired due to my neurological condition of Arnold Chiari Malformation, and related ugly sisters, Occipital Neuralgia and Complex Mixed/Central Sleep Apnoea. It has meant a lot of readjustment, but it has also made me realise that I …