I’m lounging unceremoniously on an arm chair in my mother’s dining room as I pen this prose. Outside’s solar rays producing a Super Trouper like beam, highlighting the recently unkempt lawn and borders which for weather or health reasons I’ve neglected for the last two weeks. I’ve one eye on a corner of the room where a catchup broadcast of ‘Countryfile’ plays out on TV. My other eye is on […]
It’s rare I remember my dreams. This morning, though, a segment of last night’s slumber visions remained with me until my waking hour. This sleep scene a rather dark encounter where, while within the dream I was penning a narrative in a coffee house, I was held at gunpoint by three ‘desperados’ with aspirations of stealing my laptop device. Within my state of slumber, the three gun totting aggressors lulling […]
Not that I’m complaining, but post-angioplasty I’m unable to drive my car*** for a week. A situation I deem as a mere minor inconvenience, hopefully contributing to a calmer, more reflective lifestyle, which of late has burgeoned with significantly more drama than I’d prefer. The GJ Strachan soap opera current plot lines proving quite a challenge to the scene’s main protagonists. *** – I’m unsure why I felt the need […]
This time tomorrow I’ll be Leeds General Infirmary (LGI) in situ undergoing an exploratory angiogram procedure. A followup op to an investigative treadmill stress test I underwent a couple of months ago. That being said, I’m not overly daunted that in twenty four hours time my radial artery will be punctured to allow a camera to examine the highways and byways around my coronary arteries. Why should I be?….. I […]
During a recent attempt to broaden my intellectual horizons, I was intrigued to read a statement by the late author, social critic and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens, claiming “Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well.” An unashamed contrarian, iconoclast and anti-theist, witnessing Hitchens erudite and forthright prowess in the debating bear […]
On Sunday morning, arriving downstairs post-reveille to the sight of my mother baking momentarily regressed me back to my boyhood. The pouring of Kellogs’ cereal into a yellow Tupperware bowl, which we’d had since the late 1960’s, in association with mater’s mixing bowl magic transporting me back to my Gateshead childhood. Up to her elbows in flour, eggs, milk, sugar and water, in reference to my tardiness at leaving my […]
It’s week on from leaving the clan Strachan gathering in Aberdeenshire. Seven days of existential reflection; sporadic hours where the romantic in me manifested notions of moving to that area of Scotland on a long term basis. That dominions aesthetic beauty and my middle-age desire for peace and tranquility a catalyst for ill thought out ideas of a relocation north. Common sense, the fact it’d be a struggle to secure […]
