Shiva's and Metta's Mother's Sutra

Gunung Merapi - Indonesian artist Really famous artist and it is hanging in the National Gallery in Singapore and I CAN'T remember his name! Still feeling a little bit like we are in Singapore. I promised myself I would have photos fro every blog - so i have said I will blog on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. I know this is Thursday, but it has been a week since I blogged! Well, what can I say? It has been an eventful week, as usual. Oisin got into Lagan College, and is now going to go on to do English Lit, History and Politics to eventually read Law ... he thinks in Trinity! Hah! So we are all going to, as a family, learn Irish!!! Like what?!?!?! It was very funny. Peter collected us from Dublin and then we all headed home, well, sort of, Oisin had ten minutes to get bathed, changed and then off to two interviews with Lagan and Methody. He was also offered a place in another A levelly type place but he decided to go with Lagan instead. I have always thought of Oisin as a rea...

Breakfast with Dante You know, I missed blogging. In fact I couldn't start doing the classroom until I blogged. The need to write here just buzzed round my head like a fly and writing helps to swat it. Going back to Singapore is always problematic. It gets both less and more so with age. It is always complicated. However, I am not going to talk about the complicated. Because I am an optimist I am going to talk about the good things about the past six weeks. I had fully started out the holidays with the intention of blogging daily, but as the weeks past, especially, when I was doing lots of lecture reading, it was clear that spending any more time in front of the computer was not a good idea. And I just couldn't anymore. So I just wrote in my journal. And there was a lot of writing. Lots of processing. The thing about Singapore is that there is literally no time to process, or even space to do that. I have to take my hat off to the men and women who work and live ther...

All the colours of the drinks - Sri Sun Well we are home in Belfast. There is no doubt about how lucky we are to have two homes. When we got back ... Well, Oisin got his GCSE results. They were decent and he got into Lagan. I am happy enough. Having spent my entire life believing I have peaked to early, I know that he will be alright. He knows himself that is only the beginning and the journey out begins and he has had a fair wind, like Telemachus himself. Foundation digging is very important. And Oisin has been digging - we are not simply our grades, we are also human beings who love, who have friends, who delight in life - and we go on to do other things with our lives. So... i am here because I have literally not blogged for over a month, which isn't to say I haven't been writing in my journal and thinking lots about many things, as usual. If I had to break the holiday down, it would be: Week 1: Sleep I slept so much that my mom asked me, are you alright? A...

You know the way the Republicans always blame the British for everything? Well, I am going to blame my Singaporean education for this: my aversion to science. From the very youngest of ages - 13, we were told we had to be separated into science people and arts people. This is clearly a nonsensical division. We are not science nor art people, as the students in my class demonstrate. We are human beings. Just because you love poetry it does not preclude you from enjoying zoology, just because you are interested in history does not mean you should have nothing to do with botany - in fact the more you are interested in everything the better you are as a person. A good mathematician will make a great plumber or joiner. A good astronomer will make an excellent gardener. It is a load of bollocks to comparmentalise people and then cripple them by telling them that one set of disciplines is exclusive of the other and then give value to the disciplines - like someone who understands thermodyna...