It was Valentine’s Day a few days ago and naturally, in these days of spend til you drop, it has become a commercial success. The origins of Valentine’s Day are not entirely clear, and there are several theories about how this romantic holiday came to be. One popular belief is that Valentine’s Day has its…
I suppose I have a Muse. She’s that part of me that wants to write stories for people to read. The thing is, she’s erratic. Sometimes she turns up for work and puts in a good day. Other times she seems to prefer to make paper-clip chains (do people still do that?). And sometimes she…
Yule is, after all, a season to celebrate the return of the light after the long days of darkness. Our friends took us to the Christmas fair at Waddesdon Hall to enjoy a truly spectacular light show. That was where I discovered my special nifty gloves that kept you warm while allowing you to fiddle…
Christmas, as we all know, is quintessentially a Northern Hemisphere festival, celebrating the return of the light. It’s no coincidence that several religions celebrate around the date of the winter solstice, a time of deep darkness, cold, and hunger. These days the essential dread of the cold dark has faded into the history books and…
Wishing everyone a safe, peaceful, joyous Yule however you choose to celebrate. See you all in the New Year.
Artificial Intelligence has become the flavour of the year, with much discussion on the merits and the dangers of the new technology. Many years ago, around 1990 or so, I attended a class in programming for AI. Back then it was (of course) very rudimentary but the idea was that the program we were learning…
When I was a kid finding something to give me for birthdays and Christmas was easy – just buy me a book. I loved to read and would often lie in bed after lights-out reading a book under the blankets with a torch. Actually, even when I was much, much older, buying me a birthday…
Summer has arrived with a smirk and a wave. All of a sudden the overnight temperatures are well into the mid-twenties and above and the humidity is through the roof. It’s not our favourite time of the year. We tend to let the air circulate through the house but there are times in this sort…
Peter and I are Baby Boomers, born in that particularly fecund period just after World War II. This means, by inference, that World War II was an important part of our family history. Peter’s father ended up in a German POW camp after being captured at Tobruk. My parents and their five small children lived…
Sometimes (quite often) the human world is a rather ugly place. I suppose it’s one of the reasons I write books – I can make up my own characters, their situations, and what happens. I don’t do dystopian or horror. There’s enough of that in the real world. Mind you, dystopian and horror still intrudes…