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do not be any thing / be the light we see by
I have spent my day thinking, writing, tweeting, explaining, considering, thinking some more: but we have a hung Parliament, a Labour gain of 30 seats (including Kensington, declared nearly 24 hours after polls closed, a win by thirty votes!), a Tory disaster across England, and the sight of an arrogant, out-of-control government deservedly on its ( Read more... ) -
Insomniac City
I'm reading Insomniac City, the Bill Hayes memoir about life in New York with his partner, the neurologist Oliver Sacks. After I reread Awakenings a while ago,
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this post turned into a morose diatribe about racism, I am the worst
Friends, I am so tired, jet-lag is the worst. (I do not always like William Gibson, but he is spot-on about jet-lag: ".... her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and ( Read more... ) -
housekeeping
Hello friends. This is either my last or second-to last crossposted-to-LJ entry, I think. There are a lot of you I'd be reluctant to lose touch with so I'm not going to delete straight off, but it does seem that after 16 years it has become untenable. I am here as I always am and I've tried to gather up as many people I'm aware of as having ( Read more... ) -
Awakenings
I am rereading Awakenings, the Oliver Sacks book about encephalitis lethargica and L-DOPA. I first came across the story as a teenager and predictably found it completely fascinating. But I bounced off the book a bit the first time, probably because I was too young for it and also it has a lot of quite boring prefaces. But this time I found it ( Read more... ) -
we write history with our feet
In the last week of my twenties, I sold a story; concluded a piece of litigation in the Court of Appeal; agreed to remain on secondment through to March 2018; and spoke a little Gaelic with some kind strangers. And here we are ( Read more... ) -
Kushiel's Dart
So a few of you asked me to write up my thoughts on Kushiel's Dart, once I'd finished it! (It took a while. It had somehow escaped me that the print edition is NINE HUNDRED PAGES, wow.) My thoughts are - complicated. I liked it! I really did. But I probably won't read any more in the series ( Read more... ) -
Yuletide reveals
Happy new year, my friends. Unexpectedly, I had a beautiful day yesterday - a matinee performance of Rent at St James's, and then friends, pink wine and sparklers to bring the new year in. We still have a
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