View from the Potting Shed

Photograph from iStockphoto.com.
This evening Jane and I headed over to Ninewells Hospital in sunny Dundee for an introductory lecture on Assisted Conception — specifically In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) and Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI). Let it never be said that I don’t know how to show a girl a good time on a Tuesday evening!
We were […]

From 1995 - 1997 I worked for the Shaftesbury Society with young homeless people (16-25 year olds) in London. I worked in three hostels: two direct access (in Kilburn and Camberwell) and one supported hostel in Bermondsey.
I remember hearing at that time that there was enough money being pumped into the various homelessness charities and […]

This morning I’ve been reading about the importance of silence in prayer, and the absence of words. Ironically, this quotation from the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu spoke to me:
The purpose of the fish trap is to catch fish and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten. The purpose of the rabbit snare is […]

It’s time to dust down my guitar, amp and riffs for another month: it’s Powerpoint Edinburgh tonight; the last of the current session.
I drove down to Edinburgh last night for rehearsals, which was fun. Except for the bit where I nearly crashed into the side of a lorry when, without warning, the road was […]

The miniature earth is a powerful and humbling presentation that begins:
If we could turn the population of the earth into a small community of 100 people, keeping the same proportions we have today, it would be something like this…

It’s based on the State of the Village Report which reduces the world population to a representative […]

The worst thing about being ill is the being ill bit of it.
Two weeks ago my body was working fairly well. I won’t pretend that I had the physique of an Olympic athlete, or that I was a paradigm of health — I still had dodgy kidneys, courtesy of an inherited genetic condition (thanks Dad!) […]

Believe it or not, I didn’t do any blogging last week. Oh, I know that blog posts appeared on the site each day but I actually wrote those two Fridays ago, while watching Comic Relief, and scheduled them to appear throughout the week, just so you wouldn’t miss me!
The plan
Last week I was in Selkirk, […]