If you've read my twitter feed, you might be wondering why a person who talks endlessly about biscuits and otherwise inconsequential matters felt the need to write a number of fairly serious pieces, reflecting on who he is and how he ended up doing what he does. Well, just as you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, you really shouldn't expect twitter, or any social media for that matter, to give you the full picture. Nevertheless, bearing in mind the ability of some people to take things at face value and jump to conclusions, I wrote those pieces to redress the balance and provide a bit of context.
Month: September 2019
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It's often said that people always remember where they were when John F Kennedy was assassinated, such was the significance of his death and the shock with which the news of it was greeted. I wasn't around that day, but an event of equal significance in my own life, etched on my memory in a similar way, is the death of my mother, which took me completely by surprise, despite the fact that she was terminally ill, and turned my life upside down in the space of roughly five minutes on a sunny morning in Summer 2016. As well as providing a source of bittersweet relief that her illness was finally over, her death marked the start of a new chapter in my life, providing an opportunity to reflect on her as a person as well as a mother. Joni Mitchell expressed it perfectly in her song Big Yellow Taxi when she famously sang "Don't it always seem to go, That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone". Needless to say, she wasn't just singing about paradise and parking lots.
What I learned today... 