Life

Am working on a large list of links of pages I regularly visit. At the moment it is very incomplete, so have temporarily password protected it.

Really thoughtful article here from the BBCs Stephen Sackur on his return to the UK after 15 years of foreign jaunts.

Until I was 18 years old, I had never met a black man or woman. Nor, knowingly at least, a Jew nor a Muslim.

I was a farm boy born and brought up in Lincolnshire – among the whitest of white English counties.

I remember the stir in my primary school when a family of Vietnamese refugees was housed in Toynton All Saints.

We stared and we prodded and we mimicked because these were people with whom we could make no meaningful connection. They might as well have come from Mars.

They were not threatening, they were not aggressive, but to us they were overwhelmingly weird.

For the past 15 years I have been living far away from my homeland – in Cairo, Jerusalem, Washington and Brussels. And while I have been gone I know that things have changed.

A friend mentioned today that she had visited The Bowes Museum in County Durham. Quickly googled it, and what an impressive building it is:

The reason this cropped up? The Raphael painting The Madonna of the Pinks is currently on a national tour and is resident at the Bowes until June 26.

I have been away for a few days over the Easter weekend. Normal service will be resumed today, hopefully…

I’ve always wondered about this…

UK professor concludes: cellphones don’t cause gas station fires

Maybe MythBusters isn’t a solid enough scientific authority for Connecticut state senator Andreas Stillman, who wants to ban the use of cellphones when you’re filling up your car, but a professor from University of Kent in the UK has decided to settle once and for all whether cellphones can cause gas station fires (technically he studied whether cellphones cause petrol station fires, but we’re pretty sure his research applies to the rest of the world). He studied all 243 gas station fires from the past 11 years that were supposedly sparked by cellphones and determined that not a single one was actually caused by a handset. The actual cause of most of these fires? Static electricity, which is what everyone who actually knows anything about this stuff has been saying all along.