Jim Webster's Blog, page 47

Somebody has to do it, and it might as well be someone supremely gifted

Originally posted on Lancet Foredeck:
It’s tiresome I know but I suppose it has to be done. My publisher pleads and wearily I step into the breach. It appears that a trifle of work I did, purely to oblige, has at last been published. I had for some time felt it would be an excellent…

Greetings from Tallis

Originally posted on Tallis Steelyard:
I have been asked to write, but as usual the compensation lies almost entirely in the haltingly expressed gratitude of the reader. Apparently it is now expected that a poet should not merely create the work but should then proceed to promote it. Somehow this feels wrong. One does not…

City of Culture

It has to be said that Barrow somehow produces the best in culture. We must do because we’ve pretty well got it all. We have the young ladies who stride out into the icy darkness between nightclubs protected only by a purely nominal amount of clothing and a sensible layer of subcutaneous fat; all the …

How much is art worth? I proudly present to you a chance to avail yourself of a truly retro experience!

Writers have used many subtle schemes to get people to buy their wares. Variants on “Buy now or the kitten gets it” have proved widely popular amongst the more desperate of the fancy, but frankly I don’t think that they’re entirely successful. Still the artist starving in the garret has to do something? And then …

Moving through at speed

Lambs always look sweet frolicking on the grass, kicking up their heels and jumping about. What people forget is that the same animal will often try the same tricks when it weights the best part of forty kilos. Moving a group of weaned lambs can at times be an interesting experience. If they’re all sort …

Move on, there’s nothing to see

I remember seeing the figure a few years back that in the long term we have to maintain 1% growth just to stop unemployment growing. Because of slow technological advance, in crude terms 1% of the workforce a year becomes unnecessary. When you think about this, this is what we were told back in the …

A sense of perspective

Long before Douglas Adams came up with the idea of the ‘Total Perspective Vortex’   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSnJl...  people have shown a knack of insulating themselves from the harsher forms of reality. A couple of things sort of came together over the last couple of days which just drove home to me how little of our history so …

It’s not what you do that counts; it’s what you’re offended by that matters

Funny old world isn’t it. Win a Nobel Prize for, “Discovering a key aspect of cell cycle control, the protein cyclin which is a component of cyclin dependent kinases, demonstrating his ability to grasp the significance of the result outside his immediate sphere of interest” and all anybody ever remembers is that you aren’t cutting …

The perfect body.

Ah, but the problems of body image. In spite of all the advertising by organisations like Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Loxottica, Versace, or Yves Saint Laurent, what sticks in mind is a comment made to me by an old farmer looking at a pen of bullocks. “If it’s got a backside like your mother …

To get there I wouldn’t start from here

All my life I’ve lived at a place accessible only by travelling down a narrow lane. But because our lane meets the main road at both ends, we do get passing traffic. Not a lot because intelligent people know that if you’re in a hurry, a single track road is not going to be a …