Yesterday, the 3rd August, I was listening to report on radio 4 of the endorsement of Hassan Rouhani by the Supreme Leader. I can’t find the audio file to link to it but there was in the background this extra-ordianary soviet style choral singing going on that seemed so unlike what I would have expected. …
Author archives: pasdelasbas
Ramadan and Christmas
It is Ramadan once again. It is the measure of the year, a movable cycle that is both feast and beast. I met a Welsh convert the Ramadan other day and I asked him how long he had been a Muslim? He replied that this was his fourth Ramadan. I compared it to Christmas in …
A Good Muslim
A close friend of mine brought one of his closest friends to visit me the other evening. This latter man brought with him his daughter who was 28 years old. The occasion was a shared meal and he had driven up from 100 miles away to have dinner with my friend during Ramadan. Conversation continued …
Clay Pipes
Here is a selection of clay pipes which I had the pleasure of seeing at a friends house near Barnsley. They are a very small part of an immense collection, not particularly of clay pipes but of minerals, bottles, disease from the industrial past. They have been brought together by a man who coming from …
Mad and Saintly: Mental Health and Destitution
I have volunteered in a Night Shelter for destitute asylum seekers and refugees for five years now. Asylum seekers and refugees often come from countries and situations where their experiences include intense violence, torture, dispossession and, at the least, extremes of fear, where they are escaping from levels of intimidation and lack of personal freedom …
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snow
skyfall and ideological form
Starting from the premise that the film makers are aware of what they are doing but that still they are tracing a shape whose contours are formed by the ideological sub-strata of our society. This is the ‘big other’ of Zizek and via his work Lacan, something to which reference is made implicitly in all …
public art
Pubs are closing everywhere and at an astonishing rate. Their signs are going down and for sale signs going up all over the place. I was passing this pub near Mosborough and took a photo of the sign. I wonder where they all go? There is I assume a collector somewhere with a warehouse full …
morton hall
A day in someone else’s life: 07.30: rise, dress, breakfast, settle arguing children
compassion?
I have a friend who told me about her long term interest in violence, something stoked by a young man who brought those ideas more than somewhat to life. She proclaims an understanding of the violent, the obscene, the killer, the paedophile and wonders if that makes her bad? Is she in need of help? …