Author: bish
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Reimagining
It’s a cold and wet day, following a sultry hot one yesterday. I’ve done all the simple things that occupy an indoor day and I’m frantically trying to put off starting some of the more difficult jobs I’ve been setting aside for a rainy day – like this one. Like a curious tongue prodding away…
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All the Peoples of the World (Lisbon 3)
Views from atop the Monument to the Discoverers, or Padrão dos Descobrimentos, built in around 1960 at the height of the Salazar dictatorship. This is on the river edge overlooking the Tagus, near the Belem Tower and self evidently across the road from the Jerónimos Monastery. I loved how the people on the encompassed mappa…
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Rooftop Tiles and Tiny Alleys (Lisbon 2)
On day two we acclimatised to hot hot weather, ridiculously steep hills, narrow cobbled and graffiti’d streets and so many people! For the past two years we’d avoided people; at the start of the pandemic we stayed in the house, slowly venturing into the woods and fields around us but never ever into the cities.…
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Travelling Light (Lisbon 1)
It’s been a while. Two years of Covid-19 has caused not only lockdown but a fairly ingrained aversion to crowds. More perhaps than for most, with Janet’s kidney transplant placing her pretty much at the top of the “extremely medically vulnerable” list. So, after vaccine number four and her consultant telling her she was currently…
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Bristol Airport Expansion
Recently, and in the face of opposition from every level of the local community from individuals through parish, county and regional councils, the Planning Inspectorate granted on appeal the expansion of Bristol Airport. This will enable tens of thousands more flights per year, including night flights, and ten thousands more car journeys per day. The…
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When I became
This is a stream of consciousness waffle that fell out of my fingers as I read Nimue’s post on her web site here. When I set out on this path which turned into a form of Druidry, some twenty years or so ago, it was all about seeking some gnostic understanding of whether any authoritative…
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Solar Catch Up
I haven’t waffled about the solar roof for a long time. It’s easily forgotten, just ‘being there’ on the roof and causing me no worries except for the occasional meter reading and BACS bank payment. I recently pointed someone to my solar pages – thereby doubling my readership overnight! They were considering installing solar on…
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The Privatisation of Place
There are approximately nine thousand parishes in England, and their history goes back to the Local Government Act of 1894. Some sixteen million people in England live within parished areas, and the local taxation of precept that they raise (a listed part of the Community Charge) is in the order of six hundred million pounds.…
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Blessings and Ponderings at Samhain
As we move through the time of the year when the ancestors are traditionally honoured, blessings to your dead folk. It is said, at Samhain / Halloween / All Saints / Dia de Muertos the veil between the still living and the no-longer alive is thin, permeable, navigable. For some, this time of year is…
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The Acceptance of Abusive Stereotyping
I was listening this morning to an audiobook I read in paper form many, many years ago. Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. It is a complex future fiction book and deals with many cultural taboos in quite a forthright manner, with major characters driving a plot line from positions of liberal anarchy…
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