Category: City Life
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Getting High…in 1753 | The Gin Craze
‘In all history there’s never been a culture in the world that didn’t have some drug of some kind to lift people out of themselves.’ Poverty, war, terrifying religion and women experiencing liberation… Could so equally have written Getting High about the Gin craze era of the mid 1700s 🙂 In Our Time, brilliant, as…
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Walt, The Wire and The Waltons – Thoughts on Breaking Bad and The Wire
As Breaking Bad draws to a finale (last episode airing on Sunday / Monday) I wanted to post some quick thoughts – clear warning, this may therefore contain spoilers. It’s become a bit of a truism to say that it’s the best thing on TV, but it really has been an immensely enjoyable series. I…
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‘There Can Be No Retreat’: On Simplicity, and the Fixed Vector of the Examined Life
A good friend Jonny spent a week or so in silence in the hills of Wales recently, and has been blogging really beautifully about the experience. The term I don’t like that’s often used for these periods is ‘retreat’ – it’s too military for me, and carries with it a sense of moving backwards. Though…
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Chinese Highways | Enclosure of the Commons | Minimal Wages
It seems that the current coalition government are determined to raise the revenue that’s required to keep our roads up to scratch by arranging an elaborate private finance initiative, which will probably result in the Chinese government owning contracts for road management. How can this possibly make sense? There must, one presumes, be an economic…
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Temples and Follies
Two things have caught my eye recently. Firstly, Alain de Botton’s continued plans for a ‘temple to perspective.’ The idea for this is to have a large, conic structure (shown) some 46m high, each centimetre of which will represent a million years of the earth’s history. The bottom millimetre of the whole structure will be…
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Occupy Wall Street – Turning Pirate on Capitalism 101
The media coverage in the UK has been limited, but I think the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest is interesting, and I hope it turns out to be significant. There was comment on BBC radio the other morning suggesting variously that it was the Democratic equivalent of the Republican ‘Tea Party’ movement – though I’m not…