Loneliness—that’s what will do it for you. Even if it’s well-populated. In the middle of a Christmas carol, a Victorian Christmas market, The Nutcracker, in shops with sweaty, top-to-toe crowds braying and yelling, “Here’s the credit card and damn the expense!” Yeah, loneliness.
LONDON—“Coolest.” In our postmodern world, what does it really mean? And yet, this is the seminal word that always attaches...
I don’t want to keep up. I celebrate the phenomenal advances and the good that technology and the digital industries have given humankind. But I feel like a digital party-pooper, the world rapidly leaving me behind.
Typhoon “Haiyan” (“Yolanda”), he said, was 16 hours of hell for those who lay in her path of destruction. “Emotionally, it can be difficult to handle work like this, however much one may have done in the past. The 5-year-old boy who needs an above-knee amputation, how does one live with that? How about the 7-year-old girl with a slash from a corrugated iron right across her face? You repair it, of course, but dare I hand her a mirror?”
The past, truly, is an alien country; we said and did things differently there. Don’t you sometimes hear yourself think and yearn for that old-fashioned place of certainties?
You, yes, you: what if I ignored your call? Or we passed each other by in a crowded room? Isn’t it disturbing that Cupid’s arrow could be so hit-or-miss?
By George, what a relief—all 8 lb and 6 oz of him, 10 stubby fingers curling and uncurling (practice for the royal wave?), a lusty pair of lungs, his mother’s good looks!
I can’t remember when I started to fall out with mirrors. Just as well, for on those occasions, when caught completely unaware, I suffer spasms of disbelief, espying on my stranger’s face a fresh new wrinkle here, a line digging deeper there.
He came to me in a dream, as if in answered prayers, to give comfort and balm for a long and lingering sadness; to rouse my soul from a fitful and troubled sleep. St. Francis beckoned and so, farewell to all that, we went.
As arrangements for Margaret Thatcher’s funeral on Wednesday are being made—with 2,300 guests including foreign dignitaries expected to attend the ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral—it has been confirmed that Her Majesty The Queen, with the Duke of Edinburgh, will lead mourners in honoring one of the towering figures of the political firmament of the 20th century.
