I'm getting too old for this sh*t.

On being an idiot.

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A Martian Sends A Postcard Home.

A brief account of how surreal life can get when it doesn't rain in São Paulo, plus an extensive summary of the diseases my family's had in the past two months. Fun!

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Sickbed.

Something I wrote a while ago when our son was ill. Touch wood, neither of them is (very) ill at the moment. I am so grateful for that.

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Back in the UK.

I'm going to be back in the UK next week for the first time in a year and a half. I don't mind if all the usual things happen once I get there, if all the frustrations are the same. I am not romanticising the place. It can have been changed (changed utterly) into a Daily Mail post-apocalyptic fantasy of Poundlands and hoodies and fear. But there are some things I definitely, inalienably can do there that simply aren't possible here in the megalopolis, that I am really looking forward to.

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from Lectures on the English Poets

William HazlittAll that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it. Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole being: without it “man’s life is poor as beast’s.”