Rants & Reflections

| Contents | After  too many tedious hours in ancestry.com… There are two types of family tree. The first draws a circle around me (us) and asks where I (we) came from. That’s what I’ve been doing. Stephen and Adrienne, the first graphic shows where you came from. Alexandria and Charlotte, it’s ... Read more

I remember the day Dad came home with a new stereogram. It was the size of a lounge cabinet — which he turned it into, eventually — with a pale timber finish and built-in fabric-covered speakers. The top lifted to reveal the record player, the control panel and bins for ... Read more

| Contents | Good and bad, I define these termsQuite clear, no doubt, somehowAh, but I was so much older thenI’m younger than that now — Bob Dylan, My Back Pages So, over the years I’ve trodden the well-worn path from radical to reactionary. I blame University and my enquiring ... Read more

| Contents | in my first year back at university we studied Communist China as part of Stage 1 Political Studies. My flirtation with the Red Guards was long over but once again I had to come to grips with the Party Line. Here’s the understanding I developed of the relationship ... Read more

| Contents | For some reason cartons of my old undergraduate handouts, notes and essays, with a lot of other prehistoric paper, have been jamming up our cupboards for years, and I’ve been thinking of putting a lot of it through the shredder. Heather said she’d like to compost it ... Read more