From The Kitchen Table

Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Swan’s gone

    It was a perfectly normal walk to work yesterday except that as I approached Folly Bridge I saw, lying on a low wall, a swan. A dead swan, its neck elegantly elongated and its feet curled. It didn’t seem at all marked but it was dead all right. All the way to work I thought…

  • Off the beaten track

    My son’s special girl teaches drama in a part of Birmingham called Dudley. Natives of Dudley have a very particular accent. They pronounce the name of their home something like “dood-lay”. I think it’s probably a Dudley accent that people think of when they say that a Birmingham accent is along with Liverpool, the most…

  • Waking up to money

    Apart from the snow, the story of the past few days and probably for a few more will be the bonuses that banks are planning to pay their “top” executives. The people whose expertise was such that the banks had to be taken over by the state – virtually nationalized. For years I Woke up…

  • I know it works in practice but does it work in theory?

    Look, look. This is me. Read this piece in the Guardian that I found last week. For more than a year I’ve been feeling an inadequate blogger because although I shout at the radio every morning about some perceived outrage or the other, I then get on and out and off to work and the…

  • Still at it

    It’s the time for remembrance. 90 years since the end of the first war – The Great War as my grandparents and great aunts called it. And they had been through it. I watched the remembrance service and it becomes more poignant each year. The story of the mother and sister of a 20 year…

  • Those were the days

    Gosh, I’m coming all over retro. The pre-recession atmosphere speaks to my waste- not-want- not side; newspaper articles about how home cooking, which I do already, is the new eating out, eschewing plastic bags, which I have done for years, and not flying away for weekend breaks, is the right and also fashionable thing to…

  • Fizz has left the building

    My best cat, Fizz died this week, from kidney failure, the curse of cats. He was born on the sofa in our front room (although not the same sofa as I now have guests will be relieved to know) and effervesced into the world with such vibrancy that we gave him Fizzy as a temporary…

  • Statistically speaking

    My maths is no good – and I’m not proud of it. I failed at O level (twice) and continue to fail to understand mathematical concepts. I scraped a pass in my economics papers and had to be gently taken through my statistics by a patient and gifted medical statistician who I was working with…

  • Post-festival fugue

    This is a dangerous time for me. When I begin to get over the expense of the Edinburgh festival and, in this case, the extreme dampness. When friends ask how it was and I say “great” and when they ask me to let them know when I’m sorting out next year, I don’t say “What!?…

  • For heaven’s sake

    Currently having rather more time to sit in front of my computer than normal, I picked up this piece on Sarah Palin, the woman who could be one of the most powerful people on the planet should McCain keel over. Despite my previous post on women in power vis a vis Hillary and Margaret Thatcher,…

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