Ball mobiles are on hold at the moment. I’m currently working on aluminium and brass wires supporting flat aluminium paddles or end pieces, attached by rivets. Like most worthwhile activities, all it takes is time, focus and application. Irritatingly, these tend to elude me. I need to get a grip and create a more disciplined daily schedule. Even so, it’s still difficult to fit in. I’m spending more time running, walking and going to a great gym. My health is good and I can even afford to pickup a calf injury, stopping me running, because of some reckless gym work. Sitting and inactivity are the new smoking equivalents. You gotta move to stay healthy and alive. It’s all about balance, literally.
I’m also spending perhaps too much time thinking and arriving at conclusions, an activity in many countries that is fraught with risk. Many people do this publicly and thanks to the internet and social media we are inundated with information and perspectives which can feel compelling and convincing as well as alarming and anxiety provoking. It’s a minefield. How do we make sense of it all? By what we encounter in our lives. Our experiences, relationships emotions, our upbringing and by persuasion rather than logic, reason and the general public good. Right wingers excel at perceiving threat or condemning. They tend to have a narrow focus on personal liberty, and self and class interest. Left wingers look towards the interest of the larger community and also of minorities within it. Consequently the left is vulnerable to mockery and demonisation when they champion groups whom the right regard as undeserving or illegitimate.. In the UK. as in the USA, the popular politics of emotion and feeling currently garner huge swathes of support, entirely untouched by common humanity or compassion for the vulnerable except for the purposes of lip service. The Christian/Evangelical Right, surely a clear oxymoron, have more in common with Fascism than the teachings of Jesus.
Whether it’s the UK Tory government or Trump’s America, their politics are addressed to the peoples’ basest fears and prejudices. Where’s the humanity? Where’s the compassion?
Running,Tory cruelty laid bare and King Charles 111 nearly expires from boredom delivering the King’s speech to parliament.
It’s been nine months since I had my cardiac ablation and, so far, my atrial fibrillation has not returned. I’m running around 20k a week, sometimes 25, with no ill effect, doing parkrun regularly, and an occasional 10k race. I can run 10k easily and have done a 17k in training. I did intend to…
Returning to Alive and Running. Heart firing on all cylinders (combustion engine metaphor)
Where was I? Atrial fibrillation started in June 2022 until I had cardioversion to shock my heart back into normal rhythm in November 2022. This was successful. Three months later I had a catheter ablation procedure which requires a line to be inserted into a vein or artery, in my case, in the groin, and…
Compassionate, caring Tories? Not with this Cabinet.
We supported Liz Truss winning the previous Whose Gonna Be The Next Prime Minister competition because we predicted she would sink the Conservative Party. She amply demonstrated her lack of understanding of conventional economics in the leadership debates and correctly anticipated that Conservative party members innate racism and credulity would see her through. The party…
Conservative Party voluntarily rotting from within. Shameless chancer Johnson bows out of latest Tory contest for Prime Minister leaving another rich public school boy to pull the wool over the electorate’s eyes.
Eight levers loosely fixed to check balance and movement. Atrial fibrillation still persisting. I’m on two waiting lists. One for cardioversion and one for ablation. Doesn’t sound too good, does it? Well, it’s not particularly bad. The first procedure resets the heart with a small electric shock and the second procedure threads a line up…
New/old Tories crawl out of the septic tank and hose themselves down. Heart disorder stops me running.
Hollyhocks and verbena bonariensis are in the ascendancy this year.The hollyhocks have developed rust, which is disfiguring, but height seems unaffected and they are flowering well. My running regime was going quite nicely, thank you very much, until the day of my birthday, nearly six weeks ago, when I developed atrial fibrillation. I was running…
Johnson’s Tories still banjax Great Britain. Local elections could help to change balance of power if our cognitively impaired electorate wake up.
Yes, rotating wooden balls fixed to metal rods. And why not? It’s relaxing, quirky and has a retro feel. You know where you are with a wooden sphere. It’s entirely complete and uncomplicated. But are a cascade of moving, swivelling balls art? Of course. Art encompasses great technical skill, possessed by relatively few people, who…
Alive and Running 