THE ESSAYS include pieces conveying my observations and opinions on relatively contemporary topics with which any reader might agree, disagree, find thought-provoking or hardly worth considering. Writing them down at least captures the ideas and feelings of that moment before they can escape, releasing space in the mind for other stuff to clog the synapses for a while.

 

Some, though not many, will have been dashed off almost at a single sitting during a period of high emotional disturbance. Many others may have been started weeks, months or even years ago, left to fester and marinate among the juices of time and reflection, eventually - subjected to additions, deletions and even changes of mind - to emerge sufficiently complete to float before someone else's mind.

​

There will also be entries from my personal journal/diary now (in 2017) in its eighteenth year. I began writing it under the direct influence of Alan Bennett's diaries which I still read annually in the London Review of Books and more lately and completely in book form. I admire and enjoy Bennett's diaries as a beacon of clear, still and unshakeable sanity, coupled with his quiet but incisive humour and  profound belief in the value of The Humanities in all their forms, in a crazy world that seems to be racing itself to the bottom.

 

My own diaries may not share all those valuable qualities but will certainly remind a reader of events taking place over nearly two decades ago, of which our memory may well have faded. In the process, we can reinforce our memories of bits of the past and of our reactions to those events.