From The Kitchen Table

Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Having a bit of a McLaugh

    Scotland does like to have tartan with everything. I listen to the radio in the night a lot because I don’t sleep well and normally I switch between Radio 5 and the World Service but in Scotland it seems to be all Scottish programmes – Fred McCauley who is a great comic but seemed to…

  • From the outer fringe

    Now here’s a review you won’t read anywhere else. Or possibly not. In the Fringe programme is a performance of Aykbourn’s How the Other Half Loves and intrepid friends set off to see it. They didn’t realise they were being intrepid but that’s because they didn’t realise how far from the centre Murrayfield is. They…

  • The only non-blogger in Edinburgh! Part 1

    Edinburgh; festival time. It’s a world of its own really. The Madrid crash registered only about 12 hours after it happened and normally I’d have been aware of it, almost as it happened. Since most of the media decamp northwards at this time of the year for the Festival, the Fringe, the Book Festival, the…

  • Sorry I spoke

    Once upon a time I nursed in France with a wonderful French nurse who had trained in the UK about 20 years before. Her English, as one might expect, was perfect but her idioms betrayed the years since training. She would, for example, talk of elderly patients as “zis old bird” which outdated slang I…

  • Summer in the small city

    Ah here comes summer. And here come the summer visitors – huge groups of teenagers from all over the world who take over the streets of Oxford. I swear there are more this year than ever before. I hate to be someone who moans about tourists – I’m planning on being one myself shortly –…

  • A lazy post

    This week I have: added a link to a blog by Nathalie D’Arbeloff who won the Mary Stott prize awarded by the Guardian. She asks where the older women geeks are so I felt that it was only fair to put in her link. She’s an artist and writes about stuff a bit like me…

  • Someone to watch over EU

    I’m quite a keen European and I’m sorry that the Irish referendum has turned down the Lisbon Treaty. I’m not for a second denying that the EU has many, many faults, one of which I would suggest is their failure to make clear what the Treaty involved. I used to accompany a group of journalists…

  • Then I saw it, now it I don’t!

    I went to look up my quote from The First Post a few days after posting and hey – it had disappeared. So, as I am reminded by my publisher husband, I should have added that it was downloaded on Sunday 8 June. I didn’t make it up – really.

  • I’ll still have Paris

    I remember when the UK joined what was then the EEC (European Economic Community) and the New Year’s party when we cheered our accession. Three years later I spent the 1976 New Year in Paris about to start work in a French hospital thanks to the recognition of nurse qualifications across the community. Although I…

  • No hiding place

    A few weeks ago I was a little concerned when a creature dressed in the distinctive plumage of his class passed me on my way back from work to my south of the river home. I was pretty certain I’d spotted a member of the Bullingdon Club, a notorious group which has had more publicity…

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