Sunday, 1st February, 2026
I would like to wish you happy new month but the rain continues in biblical quantities as it washes the debris of January away. Of course, it is important to maintain optimism. Life continues and water is essential to it. Hopefully, we will have a good supply for the Summer to come. There are just 4 weeks until Spring officially arrives.
In a rapidly challenging world, it is hard to maintain optimism at times. The old order is being shaken everywhere one looks. Humanity is being attacked in so many spheres, Europe, the Middle East, China and America. It is easy to forget that the Israelis are still killing Palestinians in Gaza and Russians are still killing Ukranians in Europe. China is still subjugating the Uyghurs. The religious state machinery in Iran is killing its own people on an industrial scale. The American government is hauling its own citizens off the streets, shooting its own citizens on the streets if they protest, trying to convince its electorate that black is actually white.
The question is, what the ordinary citizen can do about it particularly if the electoral route is increasingly being challenged by the easy answers of populist parties. There are many ways we can resist and fight back but they all speak to change in climate through persuasion. I write in my Blog but also on social media and I lobby politicians daily. It is so much easier to do nowadays through email, whatsapp, twitter, etc.
Music and satire are other forms of resistance, fightback and attempt to shift the political weather. I don’t know if you have seen this family before but I really like their attempts to address political situations in Britain and the rest of world. They are an interesting group.
The parents met at Cambridge University and have clearly created bright and interesting kids with a talent for music. What they are doing is saying the political world is not something that just happens to us. It is a world we must address and try to influence. It is an intelligent response of thoughtful, caring people which I appreciate. This song has been set to the flower power song, San Francisco of Scott Mckenzie who himself was born Philip Wallach Blondheim of Scandanavian ancestors illustrating the interrelationship of the people of the world. Ultimately, national boundaries mean nothing. We all live and die under one sky.
Talking about the sky, my sky, our sky, the rain has gone, the sky has cleared, the sun has come out and all is well with my world long enough to go for a 90 mins walk through the park. Joy of joys, Dear Reader.
Monday, 2nd February, 2026
Big week amid the gloomy skies. My test results (bloods & scans) will be available and I will attend a Review with the Oncology Department at Worthing Hospital. I am fairly confident but I don’t know why. These things don’t really have any early and obvious signs and I have always worried since ending my cancer treatment that it was likely to return. I just hope it is not yet. Birthday 75 is rapidly approaching, Dear Reader, and I just want 25 years more. After that, every additional year will be up for negotiation with the devil.
You will remember Goethe’s drama where Faust is unsatisfied with his life as a scholar and becomes depressed. After an attempt to take his own life, he calls on the Devil for further knowledge and magic powers with which to indulge all the pleasure and knowledge of the world. In response, the Devil’s representative, Mephistopheles, appears. He makes a bargain with Faust: Mephistopheles will serve Faust with his magic powers for a set number of years, but at the end of the term, the Devil will claim Faust’s soul, and Faust will be eternally enslaved. That will be me.
In 1985, I met a Professor and Head of the Department of History at Huddersfield University. He had been featured in my local newspaper, the Huddersfield Examiner, talking about a new area of study he was intending to lead and support. It was a Masters Degree in The History of Ideas. It was going to be a Research Degree and would be open to mature students who could give up three or four years of their evenings and had an interest in the politics of ideas and the idea of politics.
I had spent five years doing an Honours Degree in English Literature and majoring in Modern European Poetry through the Open University. It had consumed my spare time although I was working full time as a teacher. I had funded it myself and it lifted the despair of a difficult time. It restored a sense of self-esteem that I had lost by failing to get to University in the first place.
The Masters Degree was much more demanding of my time but rewarding in so many ways not least to test myself. I must admit, I always knew I could do it if I conquered my own laziness. I was awarded the Masters in 1989 by which time my Teaching career was massively demanding. I was offered the chance to go on to PhD but it would have taken 5 more years part time research. I had spent 4 years of all my spare time reading, researching writing in the libraries at the university and around Manchester and I couldn’t see myself doing the rest. I stopped.
I have written about all this before but I rehearse it here because I have made a joyful discovery – a new podcast led by Professor David Runciman formerly Professor of Politics at Cambridge University. It is a podcast set firmly in The History of Ideas. It is called Past Present Future which, as you will know if you are a regular reader of the Blog, is my obsession. I may have to wake up early in the morning deliberately just to listen each day.
Managed a walk outside again today. Not warm in the breeze. Not sunny in the sky but just feeling alive in the air was reward enough. I managed to bring some sunshine to my wife’s life today. I can’t say that too often. She collects things everywhere we go. She has mementoes all over the place that remind her of a previous experience. For weeks now she has been mourning the loss of an old, scatchy, leather pouch which she uses to hold tissues in her bag. She bought it in Corfu in 1982. It was our second Greek trip. We hired a motorbike and toured the island. It was incredibly hot.
This was her memento of that time. She has carried it with her every day for 44 years. Suddenly, it was gone and no amount of searching would regain it. Until today. I went out to the car with a floodlight torch and, after 10 minutes going slowly around every crevice, there it was and joy was unbounded.
Tuesday, 3rd February, 2026
Another dreary, dark and damp start to the day illuminated only by my monthly check on the NS&I Premium Bond ‘prizes’/earnings. At the risk of repeating myself monthly, I had a spare pot of cash that I wanted to invest with two conditions: it had to be easy access and I wanted the earnings to be tax-free. Having used our full ISA allowance for the year, the one place both of those conditions could be met was in Government Bonds.
I have had £18,000.00 in Premium Bonds for 5 months now and have ‘won’ £375.00 or an average of £75.00 per month. It puts me on line for earnings of £900.00 over the year which is the equivalent to 5.0% tax-free earnings. I had set my baseline as 4% or £60.00 per month so I am up and I still have that tantalising prospect of winning one of the many much larger awards – from £25,000.00 – £1 million. I’ve just read that 3 people in Grt. Manchester each won £100,000.00 this month. I’m moving back!
While I worry about my Oncology Review on Friday for a cancer that is now the most common to be suffered in the country, my Brother in Law, Kevan, is suffering so much worse with both liver and bowel cancer. It is a heavy burden to carry and we wish him well. A quiet and unassuming man, he must be very scared at this time. It is a lonely place to be. Apparently almost half of us will, at some time in our lives, visit that place.
When you stop to think about it, everywhere at every time is a lonely place to be. It is the nature of existence. Some cope with it by kidding themselves there is a higher being looking over them, giving them purpose. I try to mitigate it by fuelling my head with thoughts, challenging my mind to constantly test the world through ideas and concepts, through philosophy.
I was first really introduced to Philosophy as a Discipline while at Teacher Training College. It was at a time when Education of adults was on the cusp of change and a Lecturer who I admired invited me to take a Philosophy course prior to being invited onto a new Degree course which had been around for about 5 years generally but my College was just preparing to adopt. The B.Ed Degree or PGCE became a requirement shortly afterwards and my cohort were offered voluntary but automatic conversion to the Degree status in the past 5 years rather as Oxbridge graduates can pay to have their Bachelors Degree upgraded to a Masters without the pain and suffering that I had to go through.
My History of Ideas podcast this morning centres on the philosophy of Aristotle. He was a polymath student of Plato but his central philosphical tenet was
belief in the primacy of the individual in the realm of existence is a philosophical, moral, and political doctrine that posits the individual human being as the fundamental unit of reality, value, and rights. It asserts that the individual exists independently of and takes precedence over any collective entity, such as the state, society, or community.
I wonder who said, There is no such thing as Society. Margaret Thatcher, if you’ve forgotten. Karl Marx would beg to disagree. Of course, both stances can exist at the same time. The podcast this morning propounded the view that Philosphy attempts to understand the world from an individual’s standpoint by describing it whereas Politics takes that understanding and acts on it for social change.