People keep asking me what my plan is. On the positive side, I take this as a nudge that I should have one. I do. On the negative side, the question drags glaring vulnerabilities into light. Lack of income. Logical progression, lack of home, health and finally life — a…

The predictive algorithm that is the online pro-Israel lobby will have picked this article up before you and categorised it as antisemitic. Drawing a line through it and other articles I have written will summarise the whole effort, shape, nuance, argument, irony, consideration, trying shoes on other feet, inversions, inside-outings…

Reactions to Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) range from religious devotion to cynical sneers. I watched it at a cinema in Bali, one of the most popular tourist and ‘nomad’ destinations in the world. …

Everywhere one looks there are divisions. The Canadian Truckers protest against vaccine mandates — State programmes of compulsory vaccination, with attendant consequences, like losing your job if you don’t comply. …

We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid. The international community has an obligation to act. Agnes Callemard, Director General, Amnesty International In a recent indie podcast covering the news of Amnesty International’s diagnosis of the State…

Whoopi Goldberg has made the mistake of daring to talk about The Holocaust as a “human issue”, as “man’s inhumanity against man” and has been forced to apologise for “trivialising the suffering” of Jews. She is, in her own words, Jewish. Her mistake? Upsetting the Holocaust Industry (to use Norman…

It has been nearly six months since I wrote Soft Covid. This appalling hiatus is mainly due to writing effort being concentrated on a larger project (no further comment just now), completing a remarkably complicated property sale in a foreign country during Covid, and lately to Covid itself — not…

In the beginning, when news of the outbreak raced ahead of the outbreak itself, we heard about all sorts of diverse symptoms, from chills and aches to strange bunions and unusual lesions. Before it’s canonisation of symptoms into the tell-tale tickly cough, chest pain and loss of smell, Covid-19 presented…

This is the dueño (dwarf, guardian spirit, normally of a plant) of Covid-19, colloquially known in Peru as Dr Covid. It is interesting that it appears alongside the dueños of traditional Amazonian medicinal plants like Toē (brugmansia suaveolens) and Sangre de Drago (croton lechleri). The dueño is a telluric spirit…