Practical Thoughts

Dear Reader, Well, in the past two years we have experienced COVID and are still trying to find out how to live with it as it continues to mutate, and now we have another war at hand - virtually on the UK's doorstep - in the Ukraine. This war has sparked off a crisis in two major economic respects - the supply of energy forms (gas and oil) and the supply of wheat and other foodstuffs. The effect of the foregoing issues - and the already existing  effects of the   Climate Change situation - has precipitated an enormous increase in the cost of living, not only in foodstuffs but also, and particularly, the cost of energy. We all know that the situation for many has got to the point of having to choose between eating or heating. The UK prime minister has gone so far as to admit that poorer people in the UK may have to choose between buying food to keep the body alive or energy to keep warm. This has come after the prime minister announced what the government's energy strategy woul...

Dear Reader, As we can all see, Ukraine and its people are already so badly damaged to the extent that it is hard to believe what Russia will gain out of it apart from a bloated ego. At the same time, surely it is wrong to blacken the name of all Russian people, a country that has produced the likes of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky and Solzhenitsyn. The ordinary people have suffered hard and long and it is their great misfortune that the leadership of their country has usually been found wanting.  Yet it would seem that serious attempts are being made in some quarters to tarnish all Russians because of their ego-centred leader. Is the West so good? When we think back to what has been perpetrated by the West in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya (all under 'false flags'), apart from the Syria situation, I can only think that Putin has been looking at what has been done by the 'good' West over the whole of his reign as Russia's president and has decided, "Well, if th...

Dear Reader, My comment (last week) about how the main news channels seem to deliver superficial reporting led me into reading the results of some disturbing - and other elevating - investigations into what has really happened in the world over the last 15 years. Although I have been aware of a fair amount of it for some time, the scale of it now astonishes me. Without wishing to sound like a doomsayer, I detect a certain feeling that the future of the world is coming to a head. How we are to get through the next few years, in my view, will be determined very much by how we come to see ourselves. "What are we really, physical or spirit?" is the leading question, as I see it, and I would suggest that the question can be answered individually by seeking to determine whether we allow ourselves to be controlled by fear. An article I recently read partly addresses the matter in the following statement: One of the central features of traditional societies, as outlined by ...

Dear Reader, If you think - as I do - that the news is so often of a severe nature that it can perhaps be quite unsettling, then you have my sympathy. However, the passing of a renowned boxer (Muhammed Ali a.k.a. Cassius Clay) seems to have attracted a highly disproportionate amount of attention. Having lived through the same era as he, and a keen follower of sport, I would be one of the first to applaud his very unique contribution His poetical licence, creating phrases such as "I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee" are possibly as memorable as anything Shakespeare produced. But his stand on civil rights and Vietnam considerably stand out and almost surpass his feats in the boxing ring. And in the boxing ring his style itself was often sheer poetry in what is, nevertheless, a brutal sport. But, to devote so much 'air' space to his demise on the news channels, when (for example) children are being killed and maimed in huge numbers around the world, do...