The jolly postman's jolly cold.With snowy beard, he's jolly old:Delivering jolly Christmas post,While dreaming jolly turkey roast.A jolly man with ne're a frownDoing the rounds of Christmas Town.The jolly farmer's jolly pigIs jolly muddy, jolly big.The jolly church has jolly mice.The jolly vicar's jolly nice.The jolly organ's jolly soundIs heard through all of Christmas Town.The […]
The sincere mode of behaviour seeks to replace the “mere convention” of ritual with a genuine and thoughtful state of internal conviction. Rather than becoming what we do through ritual, we do what we have become through self-examination. […] The need to establish society and morality on the basis of sincerity, though, runs into a […]
Simon Critchley, describing G.W.F. Hegel’s theory of religion: Hegel will say that the divine is not the object of religious consciousness, but substance made real in the world as action and community. The divine for Hegel is not “Oh, is there a God? And, oh, how many attributes does he have? And is he up […]
Here’s a quote from Sherard Cowper-Coles’ memoir Ever the diplomat: confessions of a Foreign Office mandarin on the immediate aftermath of the case of Michael Bettany (a digruntled MI5 counter-intelligence officer who in 1983 made a ham-fisted attempt to get himself recruited by the KGB by delivering confidential documents to the letter box of the […]
Reflecting on the year as it draws to a close: that’s a thing, isn’t it? Much has happened during the past year, much of which I have no intention of discussing right now. However, I’ve remembered that I set myself some goals for the year, and so now would be a good time for reviewing […]
Saturday afternoon of last weekend, I went to Anglia Ruskin on East Road for Cambridge Conversation Café, the inaugural event of Be The Change Cambridge. This is my write-up of the event. Or rather, it’s more a write-up of my experience of the event. If you want something more objective you might want to try […]
If you’ve ever worked for a company with an officious HR department, you will probably have been told of the importance of setting yourself SMART objectives. SMART, in this context, is an acronym. It would have to be, really, wouldn’t it? I mean, if you found yourself in an organization where this sort of thing […]
Another weekend, another London walk. Last weekend Mr. H. and I walked from New Cross Gate to Thamesmead, and then walked a bit more. There had been the possibility of being joined by Dave the American, although in the event his presence took the form of a series of text messages. I’m probably going to […]
Here’s ancient Greek sophist Gorgias on the important of being good with words (taken from Enconium of Helen of Troy, translated by George A. Kennedy): Speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplishes the most god-like works. It can banish fear and remove grief and instil pleasure and enhance […]
I have a fondness for connections that bridge seemingly disparate worlds. Examples? Well, early on in my programming career I read Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception in a bid to figure out how developer-written documentation might work better. I was also intrigued by the inventor of the Pomodoro […]