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Is less really more – or less?
To keep or not to keep – that is the question. I look around my tiny kitchen and think I should de-clutter, simplify, get rid of all the surplus stuff overflowing on shelves and in cupboards. No good...
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Voices from the Void
My accident was a fascinating experience – in retrospect! I was driving happily down the main highway to the village crossroads in my little silver car about ten years ago, when a large, heavy old car...
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Bullied by the birds
It’s two months since I wrote a blog about the drought called Summer days and thirsty hedgehogs, and since that time we have had no rain. The country is split between those who live in towns- and so...
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Art and soul – do they matter?
On Sunday I discovered that I am a member of a tiny minority. I belong to a group of around three million people world- wide who watch the live performances of opera filmed from the New York...
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The Queen!
This post has been re-blogged for the reasons in my latest post The Tragic and Hilarious Life of a Blogger I’ve just seen a photograph of this radiant elderly woman coming out of hospital, her...
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Zen and the Art of House Maintenance
I think house maintenance has a better ring to it than boring old housework… this way, instead of being a housewife I could even be called a house maintenance executive, or a house maintenance CEO....
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Hollywood, Ruined Reputations and Truth
In the New Zealand Parliament this week the leader of one of the parties put up a motion congratulating the New Zealand Ambassador and his second secretary for “their courageous and commendable” role...
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The upsides and the downsides of being a woman
Something made me re-read a book for girls which my Victorian grandmother had pressed on me when I was seven. It was about a girl who’d lost her mother, and whose military father was absent. It...
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The good enough life
Back in the last century, a psychologist called Dr Winnicott coined the comforting phrase ‘A good – enough mother’ …. I looked back at yesterday, and thought, yes, I suppose it was a good enough...
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The Tragic and Hilarious Life of a Blogger !
Laughter and tears are not very far apart was the subject of an essay I once had to write at school. This is somewhat how I feel as I go once more into Spam, to clean out yet another of the daily two...
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Carrying On With The Army Again (part 4)
This is the continuing story of ‘my brilliant career’ in the army! I had returned from my regime of prayer and fasting, otherwise known as a Religious Leadership course, none the wiser, but many times...
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Seize the day!
Today was not one of those days, but One of Those Days. Yesterday, as I watched the tiny, greenery- yallery birds we call silver- eyes in the trees, hunting for insects and the like, I thought how I...
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Rise up children and be free
How to make yourself very, very unpopular! Years ago I discovered that in the tug of war between the rights of women and the needs of children it can be dangerous to take sides. I gave up writing...
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Cricketers, bridge-players and great white hunters
These I have loved, to quote Rupert Brooke. I think I’m a serial monogamist – but didn’t dare put that in the title and invite a torrent of prurient spam into the file! Neither did I dare put ‘men’ in...
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The mystery of other lives
Not a picture of hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil, but a picture of the three fat wood pigeons sitting on the power line outside our house yesterday. They used to be plentiful, but...
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Peace or Patriotism?
Is patriotism enough? Nurse Edith Cavell first raised the question before she was shot by the Germans for treason in 1916. She was an English nurse, matron of a Belgian hospital when the Germans...
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The fun of fashion
What to wear has occupied many happy hours and years of my thinking life. So though some research has claimed that little girls and boys are conditioned to be male and female… pink versus blue… I’m...
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Many lives or just one?
“To live is by universal consent to travel a rough road. And how can a rough road that leads nowhere be worth travelling? “ A well known philosopher, MacNeille Dixon, asked this question in a series...
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Food, fear and films
Village life takes ingenuity in a tight spot, and stamina – plenty of it! These are the times that test men’s souls! Well, we haven’t actually had any chicken stealing like Mr Woodhouse in ‘Emma’,...
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The drug we can’t live without
“Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.” I couldn’t agree more with Sidney Smith, an Anglican clergyman, who died in over a...
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