Jacinda Ardern revisited The Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, kept her cool this week when an earthquake struck.  She has also been praised recently for her exemplary handling of the pandemic in her country.  I last wrote about her in March of last year after the massacre in Christchurch, so it may be […]

Categories: News

Dominic Cummings “But then he had just appointed as a special adviser Dominic Cummings, the former Vote Leave campaign director, a man so toxically divisive he couldn’t even unite himself” ~ John Crace, July 2019 Dominic Cummings has been in the news this weekend because on Friday night it was revealed that he broke his […]

Categories: News

Normal People The TV series “Normal People” has been a five-starred television hit during this lockdown period.  Written by Sally Rooney, it tells the story of an intense first love, set in the Irish educational system, including at Trinity College Dublin where Sally Rooney gained her own degrees.  I find myself reading her first book […]

Categories: Book Review · Celebrities

Blaise Pascal “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone” ~ Blaise Pascal This is the third of my new  series of occasional philosophy blogs.   I started with an Aries, Rene Descartes, a true Aries in every sense of the word, an individual and an initiator.  I then […]

Categories: Philosophy

Tony Lloyd “It’s the humanity of it, the 150,000 small human gestures every hour that makes the NHS a human institution.” ~ Tony Lloyd You may not have heard of Tony Lloyd (Labour MP for Rochdale, Greater Manchester) but he gave a poignant and memorable interview to Helen Pidd in the Guardian on Friday following […]

Categories: News