Archive for month: December, 2012

Another tick of the clock

31 December, 2012 (12:40) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

I know lots of people who say they don’t like New Year’s Eve. They mean, I think, that they don’t like gaudy celebration or forced jollity. How can anybody not like New Year’s Eve itself? It’s just another tick of the clock, no more significant to your pulsing gizzards than a birthday or Christmas or […]

Hope for Christmas

24 December, 2012 (13:41) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

It would be easy for this festive season to be very unfestive. For example, I wonder why scientists are bothering to drill deep below the Antarctic to discover whether primitive life forms can survive under water with no sight of the sun. They should have come to Cornwall. Outside, the road is once again in […]

Closing time

17 December, 2012 (11:42) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

I wonder how many market towns there are in the country around which you could walk, on the Saturday before Christmas, and find some of the shops have shut early. There’s certainly one such in Cornwall: we trooped around Launceston on Saturday from about 2.30pm and several had the ‘closed’ signs up.  Not all, by […]

For God’s sake?

10 December, 2012 (14:37) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

I never cease to be amazed at the number of people who believe a life is well spent if it is dedicated to preventing other people, the wrong people, the people who don’t agree with them, from living. With fresh debate on gay marriage last week, out came the Christians who believe sodomites are damned […]

In the navel

3 December, 2012 (11:37) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

Isn’t it the case that when a star comes to the end of its life it sort of implodes, turning in and in on itself until it disappears up its own fundament, leaving a black hole sucking in the unwary passer-by? So it is with the national media, now feeling the pitiless gravitational pull of […]